2009-05-01
One reason I like Nodame Cantabile's Chiaki
One of reasons that I like Chiaki is that he is that rarity in anime, a competent protagonist who understands his own competence. The usual pattern is that the protagonist is either unskilled (and learns through the course of the anime) or is basically an idiot savant, ferociously skilled but without understanding.
(Nodame herself is an example of the latter category, and one of the themes throughout Nodame Cantabile is people trying to get her to harness and direct that ferocious skill, to think about and understand what she is doing.)
One particularly blunt way to put the attraction of this is that it means that Chiaki has clues. He comes to realizations; he sees problems; he fixes things. In short, he gets to act intelligently, not blindly. He gets to be smart in his field, which is refreshing to see.
(This is unfortunately kind of a rarity in anime protagonists; being smart this way is usually reserved for the secondary characters.)
2009-04-25
The problem with taking pictures of people bicycling
(Well, one of them.)
There are three shutter speeds for taking pictures of moving bicycles:
- too slow: the bicyclist and bicycle are motion blurred (useful
only for artistic effect).
- too fast: everything is frozen motionless and the bicyclist
looks like they are doing an unnatural track stand.
- just right: the rider and bike are sharp but there is still visible motion blur in the wheels (and perhaps the rider's feet), so the bike still looks like it is actually in motion.
The 'just right' shutter speed is a narrow zone and varies quite significantly depending on how fast the rider is going. (And it goes quite high; I believe I've seen visible motion blur in shots at 1/250th, and the bicyclist wasn't going particularly fast.)
So far my best results have come from cheating, in the form of panning with the bicyclist at 'lower' shutter speeds (lower being relative here). But this has its own problems; it's okay for shots of just the bicyclist, but it's not good for 'rider in context' shots, since the context is blurred.
(And you have to carefully match your panning speed to the bicyclist's speed in order to keep them sharp, which I am not yet all that good at.)
My feelings on Sora wo Kakeru Shoujo episode 11
(Spoiler warning, and in fact this is probably going to be incomprehensible if you haven't seen the episode or read a summary, such as here.)