Current pedal obsession: Pladask Elektrisk Baklengs.
Granular delay, etc. etc, etc.
The Pladask Baklengs is categorized as a granular synthesizer. It breaks a delayed signal into snippets of sound called grains and plays them back forward, reversed, randomly ordered, timestretched, pitched up or down an octave and fed back into themselves for minutes-long morphs. As the third in the BakXXX trilogy of pedals from Pladask, following Bakvendt and Backfram, it adds the ability to microloop the 2700ms of memory. This article is an instant-immersion recipe book for Baklengs that can turn it from quirky anomaly to a vital pedal on your board.
Photo: Restoring highlight detail with Image Blender.
Before
“Normal” exposure can suck the realism out of an image. When highlights lose their detail (as in the example photo) you can try gamma or luminance correction in your editing software. But you’ll usually get better results with a sample trick in Image Blender, Union or other photo blending app. By blending two copies of the same image using the Multiply mode, you’ll enrich the highlights, restore overall vividness, reveal depth and add realism.
Ghost videos with the Dayblur preset and Pro Camera by Moment.
Pro Camera by Moment is a professional photo/video camera app for iPhone with some experimental tricks up its sleeve. The Slow Shutter simulates a bulb-mode, manual shutter combined with a neutral-density filter for long exposures in daylight. What’s actually happening is that your iPhone is taking and merging a succession of shots.
What may not be obvious is that it the app saves this as a Live Photo and also compiles the all the frames into 1940p x 1440p video (without audio) that can be exported from the Live Photo.
WhileHalide rules in iOS still photography and Filmic rules in iOS video, Pro Camera by Moment is probably the best pro-quality app for those who shoot as many stills as video. The added plus is that Pro Camera lets you save presets for various photo and video shooting functions and call them up with two taps. This article is a recipe book for how to create Pro Camera presets. While some are practical, others are wonderfully experimental.
My father’s warning about technology from 30 years ago.
Jim Wolfe running the Sylvis booth at Folklife 1972
In finally getting around to assembling my father’s memoirs 30 years after his death, I was surprised at his insight in emerging trends that are coming to pass today. In Memoirs of a Professional Letter Writer his views on technology apply to AI as much as they did to automation in his time. As he noted: as a society, we repeat our missteps with alarming regularity.
wolfe with an e's blog
