Yourself?

Photography, Asimov's, UML

Haha just remembered something that struck me while waiting at Jitterbugs for my dance class. Saw this little pamphlet there advertising lingerie, and I just flipped it open to glance through. (For research purposes! I must clarify.)

Readers, do this with me. Notice the different tones of the model's skin in the various photographs, even though the model was the same. Notice the different looks the differently coloured lingerie gave the model, and think why this is so.

The colour of lingerie affects the grey point of the camera. The grey point is determined by the camera's light metering system. Thus, the camera compensates for the change in colour due to the lingerie by slightly overexposing, undersexposing or stretching the colour range.

Look closely at the skin tone. Can you see that in the black lingeries, the skin tone is stretched. That means, there is a greater range between the highlights and the shadows. Look at the tans, the skin tone is compressed. There isn't that much a difference between the highlights and the shadows. Look at the whites. There is a greater difference between the highlights and the shadows.

This is how lingerie colour works to fool the eye. Why is black seductive and white chaste? Why does lingerie only have such an effect, and white and black cloaks considered equally chaste by our muslim friends?

Perhaps seduction, from the colour balance in photos, is about shadows. The more shadows the eye is drawn to, the more mysterious the object is, and hence the greater the desire. The smaller the highlights, the more pearlescent the object appears, and more gem like.

Same thing as the white, but instead, the idea is reversed. It shows the person to be gemlike and pure, with still a little shadow, a little uncertainty.

Tan of course, is average.

Anyway... Lets move on to more serious things that I've been spending my time on. Just finished Asimov's Foundation's Edge, and rereading it again, you can see all the references sci-fi has taken from it. Part of the story really reminds me of the Star Wars, and the ending is straight out of Ender's Game. Of course, who influenced what, only the chronology can tell us. But it was a good read all the same.

UML is this markup language that I'm exploring right now... How do you link all that you think about into one coherent whole? When I was doing literature, we used to annotate in the margins, so that when we pick the book up again, we can see what we thought about in the past. But now... where do we have time to pick up books again to see what we think?

How can we connect the thoughts of the past, to the thoughts of the present, in a form that will be available to us in the future? How can we do that without too much work on our part?

I used to take this blog as my source of history. But blogs do not organize. They will not stay for ever either. There must be a better way out there and I will find it.

posted by Downhere. @ 1:27 pm