MarshWorks

I've completed a new set showing my favorite pictures from this winter.

click to see slideshowYou can see it in my custom slideshow viewer here, but you may need to be a bit patient as some the images take about 10 seconds to load. I keep the number pretty small, so hopefully they will be worth the wait.

I've included a sequence of four images from Donner Summit that I found particularly interesting, not only for the images themselves but also for the way nature created them.

                        This shows an amazing ice formation used for four of the shots in this set.  These were taken at Donner Summit, California, the day after a warmish storm. Rain had fallen on top of the snow and frozen into a fascinating layer of ice, which remained behind while the snow melted underneath it.
To show this, here I have put my fingers under the ice but on top of the snow (this thin layer of ice is floating an inch or two above the snow below it).

For the these shots, a friend suggested I use the macro on her Digital Rebel and use the lens cap as a background instead of my fingers.

The depth of field was impossible, or course, but the rainbow effects were particularly satisfying.

Okay, TED rocks. Go to ted.com to find amazing people doing amazing things, search out your own passions, and get inspired. No other way to describe it.

If you like thinking about radical ways of expanding computer-human interaction, you'll dig this video too. I certainly do.

I've been enjoying the video at ted.com. Here is a cool one that reminds me of experimentations I did a few years ago with a projector and camera tracking colored objects and shadows, in my case for simple interactive children's games. What I enjoyed about my experimentations is that it gave me full-body input mechanism, which is particularly suited to young children who like to move.

Anyway, check it out:

This Friday, January 23 at 7PM, my brother Jon (keyboards), and I (violin), are performing for 30 minutes before a Placer Nature Center lecture on the Environmental Legacy of the Gold Rush.

Information can be found at http://www.4thfridaylecture.org/environmental-legacy-gold-rush.html.

We're going to play pieces from: Pat Metheny (modern jazz), Darol Anger (new-age/fiddle), Jean-luc Ponty (jazz-rock violin), traditional Irish and Bluegress tunes, and Liz Story (new-age piano).

You can see more information about our music in prior blog entries by clicking on the "Music" category to the right.

We're also playing in two months at for another lecture: http://www.4thfridaylecture.org/hydrogen-economy.html.

Hope to see you there!

My friend Stephanie Bloom told me about the Gray Lodge Wildlife Refuge about a year ago, and these photos are the result of my second trip there. About 2 hours North of Sacramento, near the Central Valley town of Gridley, the Gray Lodge Wildlife Refuge provides a over-wintering site for many thousands of waterfowl.

The whole family was loaded with cameras, and a few of these shots were taken by my son, Denali Marsh.

I've uploaded these photos to Flickr, but I have a new revision of my custom Flex/Flash Photo Viewer that hopefully will provide the optimal experience: Gray Lodge Photo Viewer. Be sure to click the full screen icon on the bottom right.

I keep tweaking the viewer: this rev includes the following features: new simpler cleaner buttons, optimal auto-size picker: image loading based on the viewer screen size (smaller images will load faster), new option (in the Options window) to limit the image auto-size picker to download to "Large" instead of "Original", cross-fades, ability to "sign in" to see restricted family-only photos (although there are none in this set), as well as various bug fixes. The 'Help' feature is not done yet...

Let me know your favorite photo!

-UPDATE-

I updated the prior link to my latest version. It's got a number of improvements in the user interface.

I've finally created my own photoviewer! It is similar to Flickr's and Picassa's but with a few features that fairly serious photographers are interested in. I've built it in Adobe Flex/Flash, and I'll post the code as soon as I clean it up a bit and finish with a few more features.

I've yet to write up a bit of 'help' for the application, which will include credits for code I've incorporated from other sources, which I'll try to get to soon.

There's lots to do to improve the photoviewer, such as animations and more.

I'll be adding longer descriptions, including Journal entries from our adventures.

Click to see my "Minimal Alaska" set in my custom photoviewer - this is about 55 of my favorite photos from Alaska.

Obviously this is a work-in-progress!... enjoy the current version and check back to see improvements and other photo sets! You can comment below as well.

-UPDATE 1/26/09-

Updated to my latest version of the photo viewer.

I've been hiking, backpacking, and camping in Alaska with my family - wife Melissa, daughter Summer(10) and son Denali (13) - for the last three weeks.

I've been doing much photo editing, and will create blogs for our adventures with photos, but it is taking a bit of time to get through all the photos!

Meanwhile, here's a first impression: there's life everywhere. Even in the icewater, the glacial ice, and the rocks.

On the trail up Eagle River Valley our very first day in Alaska, we came across this awesome tree’s mouth, and our young hobbits, Summer and Denali, just had to stand inside it.

How that we’re home, and we look closer at this picture, we’ve discovered how often very important details can go unnoticed.....

...we hadn’t realized that the trees in Alaska are awake!

More posts on the way soon!

This New York Times article titled Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike resonates with me.

IT’S a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.

As a product designer, I see problems that need solutions that pull widely from many fields. But somehow, just getting the experts from all those fields into the room doesn't create innovation: just innovation death by committee. I've always felt that innovation is about listening - listening with respect and genuine get-your-mind-around-the-other-viewpoint understanding.

By listening, I can bring those competing expert viewpoints into a single holistic mental picture, and thus create something truly unique without suffering committee death: in the end I hold the whole picture of the product in my mind and can work out each detail until it is sketched, prototyped, and implemented.

This article expands my view of the "da Vinci model", as I think of it. It says:

“Look for people with renaissance-thinker tendencies, who’ve done work in a related area but not in your specific field,” she says.

The renaissance-thinker is wildly interdisciplinary. He sees relationships outside his own immediate expertise, because he either has multiple expertises or is able to truly listen and explore. The concept of neophyte expertise has long been important to me: the neophyte has no personal arrogance and is able to listen in a different way than the expert... and is willing to listen to more viewpoints.

The article also quotes my absolutely favorite marketing book: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. I'll put together another post on this book sometime.... a profoundly simple way of thinking about communication in marketing and education.

click to see full imageMy brother, Jonathan, and I are playing live on November 16, 2007, 7:00 - 9:00 PM, at PachaMama's Organic Cafe in Auburn, California! We've been playing together every week at our church for the last two years, and of course off and on for 25 years, and if I do say so, I think we're sounding quite good. Click the image to the left for the flyer, and here's a printable black and white one. It's free and the kids will be comfortable in the relaxed environment.

Jon plays a keyboard with quite a range of tambral possibilities (lots of cool instruments) and I play violin, probably in a way you've never heard before. Similar to many things in my life, I always want to be unique, and my playing strays quite far from the typical classical mold.

We play our own combination of ethnic music including Irish fiddling and Bluegrass, mixed with Modern Jazz (lots of Pat Metheny - youtube example here and another here ), Jazz (including the occasionally bebop standard), and Newage with luscious synthesizer orchestrations from Jon's keyboard. I wish we had a recent recording I could post... but we'll solve that soon...

Perhaps the strangest thing about my playing is that I don't strive for that "classical" ideal violin sound. Some songs require a raspy blues voice, often I lose the vibrato, and some notes need to fade away into a wispy nothingness. I keep a groove with non-tonal "chops", which make the violin sound like a snare drum. And if the phrase requires it, I can make the instrument sound like a Jimmy Hendrix fed-back electric guitar. (All acoustic, no electronic manipulation needed.) But, all the while, this is within the overall expression that is very accessible... not avant-garde at all.

If you're local to Auburn, I hope to see you there!

See my Squiggle drawings under the Squiggle item in the Navigation Bar to the right....

Are they art? Are they serious? Are they doodles? What do you think? What do you see in them? Everyone sees something!

Let me know! Comment below!