You may know my blog post about me visit to Berlin this year. I found it a little demotivating to work with the constraints of the layout of my blog and the web in general, and viewing photographs on a computer screen in a web browser is equally rewarding. So I decided to make a book. A book with many colorful photographs I took in Berlin in the past years, accompanied by some personal notes and stuff.

Since it’s priced at very juicy 50 Euros I don’t expect that any of you actually buys it but then I thought “what the hell” so if you’re feeling rich and out of your senses and want to cast a smile on my face then buy one and give it to your friends (or foes).

Thanks for reading!

This is a short photo-blog-post of my impressions.

Berlin needs to be experienced best through the microscope of everyday experiences. Berlin is detail, it is a patchwork of delicacies woven together by stretching alleys and slowly crumbling houses. Berlin is chipped-off paint on pre-war buildings, covered in stickers and iced with graffiti. They look all the same from afar but become more and more discrete the closer one looks.

But don’t get lost in the details. Enjoy the sun, enjoy the wind, enjoy the low prices and the smell of coal and smoke in the winter.

Berlin is flat. At least in Google Earth it is. Once you roam the sidewalks they are an uneven terrain for the unassuming traveler flipping the flops. Right now one of my feet rests on a loose cobblestone in a shabby little café. Every café is shabby and small but every single one is it in a different way and offers different specialties. And no table is stable enough to keep one’s drink from spilling.

The wall is long gone yet every day I wonder where it led through. The former east looks like the former west, the former west looks the same while pretending to look eastern.

Drug dealers do business in subway stations while young mothers talk to their kids in German and English about the colored tiles. A crazy man rambles drunkenly, a bottle slowly rolls towards the platform’s edge.

Spanish, English, French, Turkish and German are the stones in Berlin’s mosaic of impressions, shimmering like the tops of girls playing soccer in the Görli-Park, a rare event as I have been told.

Everybody smokes. Everybody coughs. Everybody walks their dog. Everybody has a gay friend. Everybody has a tourist friend. Everybody is polyamorous. Everybody meet anybody on the city trains. Nobody looks back.

Pedestrians are noticed only when they cross the streets in numbers, paying no attention to the color of the Ampelmann streetlights. Only sometimes women are gallantly allowed to pass in front of vehicles so their drivers can catch a good glimpse at the lady’s ass.

The subway stations smell like any subway stations and the night is as dark as the night is anywhere. Yet the train cars smell slightly different and the clouds move slightly faster.

Nobody looks at you when you look odd for everybody looks odd in their own way. Steady currents of people mingle in Kreuzberg an scatter in Mitte.

Meeting people is easy, getting to know people is incredibly hard.

I leave my mark.

I embrace Berlin.

But wait, there’s more!
There also is a photo book available now with many many more colorful pictures. Check it out if you’re interested

After enjoying the breakfast a little too long I was rushing down Königsstraße in my car so I would make it to Pixar’s RenderMan presentation. I already knew what it was going to be considering last year (“The Über-Sprite”, the rocket, the fast-rendering motion blur) but Pixar is rather generous in handing out posters and presents and I wanted me to get another teapot for my collection ¹. I was too late, the room bursting with people. Obviously, word had spread that you get presents. People can be so greedy. I asked if I could make a reservation for the afternoon but it was in vain.

There I was standing, lacking a teapot and a clue of what I wanted to see instead. I headed to the biggest hall and ended up in “PhotoReal Facial Animation” by Patrick Davenport and Steve Caulkin of Image Metrics. They showed the sample clips I already knew so it was no surprise to me that… (click “show” to view spoiler) [spoiler]…Emily’s head was CG.[/spoiler]

You can find the clips also at YouTube if you’re interested.

The crazy stuff Imagemetrics does is providing face tracking with only the use of a video camera. The tracked regions of the face are then moved on a CG model. Tweak the keyframes and you’re done. It’s that easy! Well, it’s not. Steve Caulkin laid out the long way to their Emily demo which occurred to me as not really time saving: Apart from photographing the actress’s face for the texture, there also had to make a cast of her teeth but the molded teeth wouldn’t necessarily fit correctly so you end up taking x-rays to learn how to place the teeth correctly. And that’s only the beginning.
When scanning the different expressions of the actress the data was anything but coherent so somebody had to clean up all the meshes (about 55) and get the details out: Pores and such can only be done with a bump or displacement map. It would be just too much for the statistics-based tracking algorithm.

Steve Caulkin owes me a venti Caramel Macchiato. His presentation was in-depth and very interesting but, alas, Steve is more a guy you put in front of a C++ compiler than in front of an audience and it was hard to follow his low pace.

So I ended up at Starbucks with an iced caramel macchiato before making another attempt at getting into one of Pixar’s presentations. I queued up 20 mins and before they opened the doors there was already not much oxygen left. And I felt the urge for another caramel macchiato.

Pixar’s Carreer Gears was a again a valuable information on how to apply and how to put your reel together for Pixar. Right in the beginning the panelists ² asked the audience to raise their hands of what position at Pixar they’re interested in. To sum things up: Two thirds were character animators, many wanted to become story artists and only a few people were interested in the other stuff. And I bet I was the only compositor in the whole room. Here’s what’s strange: Last year I was told that Pixar doesn’t really do compositing which I thought was a joke or they wanted to pull my leg. Today they also didn’t say anything about job openings or positions in compositing. Very strange.

The panelists talked about their experiences at Pixar and how they got their job and spread the usual tales of people who were hired right off the college. Then they took questions. I must have dozed off somewhere in between but it was mostly asked on the process of applying and what Pixar is looking for. Here’s the stuff I remember:

• Don’t send in a reel when you have nothing to show.
• Put your name on everything.
• Have the DVD region-code free and tested to play on a standard set-top DVD player (NTSC and PAL both are fine).
• Apply for a certain job instead of just applying for the database.
• Send every 8 to 12 months an updated reel to show how you progressed.
• Don’t send every week new reels.
• Write a decent cover letter. They’ll read them.
• Don’t forget the all-important shot-breakdown. Preferably even on screen.
• Don’t chase the ostriches on the front lawn (I guess that’s where I dozed off).

Interestingly I gradually lost my interest and my caffeine addiction kicked in hard after an hour so I left for a chili dog and a precious cup of coffee. At Starbucks they either love me or hate me.

For lack of motivation to look for the right screening room for “Analog Artifacts in CGI” I went with the crowd to witness “Skin & Lighting Research” by Christophe Héry of ILM whom I already know from last year.

Holy moly! In his presentation I saw more formulas than in my whole college education ³ In fact he told nothing new about subdermal distribution and the models on how to calculate them (although I didn’t understand much of the math). So far, so good. But what If you can’t afford raytracing because, say, your artists produced more vertices than the final rendering will have pixels (see Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man’s Chest)? You’ll have to have an point cloud based approach to dodge memory demanding raytracing. And when you don’t have raytracing going on RenderMan really does the trick fast and good.

Cute as a Button

That lecture served as the perfect introduction to what we all have been waiting for: The Curious Case of Photoreal Head Replacement.

Jonathan Litt had a huge presentation explaining the lighting, rendering and compositing of that huge task. How do you start? They started with a artfully crafted latex-maquette of Brad Pitt’s face made old, for it had a really realistic appeal in subsurface scattering and served as most valuable reference when comparing renderings of the CG head to it.

The head itself was done in Mudbox (yay!) and in it’s highest resolution had about 4.5 million polygons. This high level of detail was preserved by using displacement maps, that further were driven by curves so wrinkles would get stronger or weaker depending on the facial expression. The eyes were modeled and textured anatomically correct (I’ll just throw some expressions at you of what they considered: caruncle, meniscus, conjunctiva, sclera, cornea). As further reference they had a extreme-high-res photograph of Brad Bitt that you could see the micro-wrinkles between his pores. “That’s thousand dollar pores!” Jon joked.

But this perfect model also needed to be lit in perfect coherence to the on-set instruments and light sources. So additionally to the high res long-lat-HDRs that were taken on set, there were extensive survey data on each shot of all the light sources and scene geometry so that the HDRI could be mapped back in Maya onto this surveyed geometry.

The maquette of the head was photographed in LightStage with light from all possible directions (separately). A script then made it possible to color and blend these separate light-passes together based on the information of the on-set HDRIs. Why the hassle? Because the renderings were put next to this near perfect reference and the artists could check on how close they got.

The next obstacle was to choose the right approach on how the HDR sampling should be done, either Inside-Out (I-O) or Outside-In (O-I) from the HDR. The I-O approach is usually used to sample the environment for Global Illumination. You have to fire a lot of rays to cover correctly bright light sources. So you need to find hot spots and treat them as emissions. I-O works well with spheres but with other geometry you get shadow bending ⁴. The solution to this problem was to scatter the origin of the emission-positions during rendering (see the paper of Kollig & Keller, 2003).
probably guess that it didn’t simplify things that the head was moving through the scene.

The solution to all this blocking and head-movement was to reposition the HRDIs on every frame on the position of the body-double’s head. Because there was enough tracking data of the head moving through the scene the mapped HDRI in Maya was rendered in Nuke to match the position of the head which was much easier than doing it from scratch.

What comes now is really sexy: To single out light sources the direct practicals and instruments visible in the HDR were blocked or painted out in Nuke resulting in an HDR image of the ambient lighting. The missing “hero lights” were then positioned as area lights in Maya and given a HDRI texture. This was also very important for the eye-lights.

Still there had to be adjustments made for the eye sockets and eye-lights because on set the lighting was done on the body actors.

I really realized that I want to work at Digital Domain: They value Maya, Mental Ray and, most important Nuke. Adopt me!

Blogging,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

The last presentation I saw before going to my car for some sleep was by Steve Preeg on the Animation and Performance of Benjamin Button. The big issue was on how to capture the performance of Brad Pit and have it applied to the digital head. And because the show was a $ 150 million Fincher/Pitt movie there was no room for error. If you’d mess it up, they would mess you up.
To get all the muscles in Brad Pitt’s face right Preeg thought about CAT scanning him but his manager just told Steve to think of something different. And so he did. Initially Digital Domain got the guys from Mobile who had developed a volumetric capturing system and captured various key poses of Brad Pitts face as basis for the blend shapes in Maya. When everything was tested and worked on they needed to capture the actual performance by Brad for the digital head.
They had him watch the clips from the movie with the body actor so he knew what was going on around the him. During his performance his face was filmed from four different positions, his cues were given brad via in-ear monitoring. In fact, Digital Domain even tried Imagemetrics but the result was too ‘dead’ to them, however it helped much in timing the animation which was all done by hand. Thus it was guaranteed to keep the intent of the performance rather than applying it with strange results. “Sometimes is just a millimeter more or less on one of the eyelids between creepy and cute”.

What I have learned today:

• That Steve from Imagemetrics probably wouldn’t pass a Turing test.
• That you can capture the facial performance of actors during motion capture by having them wear head-mounted camera-rigs with a light source both pointed at their faces.
• That on a Z-buffer approach to subsurface scattering the resolution of the buffers matters a lot (bigger = better).
• That on a Z-buffer approach to subsurface scattering you should keep the buffers separate, meaning that nothing that’s not part of the skin may cast shadows inside the skin.
• That on a Z-buffer approach to subsurface scattering won’t let you have your precious raytracing. So nobody does it anymore.
• That you best take texture photographs of skin by having polarization filters on your lights and one (90° out of phase) on your camera. Thus you block out the specular highlights and only get the diffuse light. Still you need to paint out shadows. Use 6 soft lights when you don’t have the luxury of having a Light Stage.
• A big deal in believability in CG skin are oil layer and peach fuzz. If you can’t nail it down why something doesn’t feel right then it’s usually one of those things.
• That working on 64 bit machines with 16 gigs of RAM really saved Digital Domain’s ass in producing Benjamin Button.
• That the UV-Space in Nuke (if kept in the EXRs) can save much time for last minute changes on textures.

What surprised me today:

• That you can talk passionately about human emotion without showing any.
• That Image Metrics also use Eurostile as their house font. Like me. And they’re not the only ones so I really should think of a new font then…
• That relatively few people who want to work at Pixar are interested in lighting, shading, layouting, rendering, controlling, software engineering or cinematography. They all want to become animators, character designers or, cough, directors.
• That I used working with z-buffered renders a lot in the hey-days of the late 90′s. I feel old.
• That not a single CG spotlight was used for the lighting of Benjamin Button.
• That Brad Pitt’s teeth were too white to pass as a 70-year old. For the digital head Steve Preegs teeth-color was used. That’s why he quit smoking on the show.
• That it was the first time that I read ‘LOL’ in a presentation. It is 2009 and netspeak finally conquers offline-speech.

Usually I don’t like the winter. It’s cold outside, I am cold, I can’t wear my favorite clothing (hawaii-shirts and flip-flops), I have to dig out the car whenever I want to drive it, then it’s cold in the car and the snow-clots on my trouser legs melt and run into my socks while driving and then I’m cold again.
Still, when I think I can’t take it anymore, it snows again. Heavy flakes tumble in the air before resting on the ground, little by little covering up all the unpleasant details and the dirt, muffle harsh sounds and immerse the open land in innocence and tranquility — right before my window. In these moments of joy and inner peace I linger at the window, sipping my coffee. And then it strikes me: “I gotta take some photos!”

But this year I refrain from taking the same stereotypic winter photos everybody shoots every year (with some exceptions, of course). I wait for a spark of inspiration. Imagination. Whatever. And this year it came in the subsiding dusk of yesterday’s evening when I got off the Autobahn.

There it was, the cell phone relay station with its two metal halide floodlights turned on. For absolutely no reason it illuminated divinely the surrounding field of pure, inviolate, foot-deep snow. Right between the freeway exit ramp and the autobahn itself was a glowing blue patch of no-man’s-land. I drove home to get tripod and camera to record this strange sensation, and I even dared to leave my tracks in the untouched snow, but kept a respectful distance when taking pictures.

When I came back home, there was the light from outside illuminating not only more powdery snow right before my window, but also my room from a very low angle. It never occurred to me, that when I would turn off the lights I would be rewarded with another artificial light source creating an odd, yet very interesting atmosphere. Click — I took another photo.

This is just a little test to see how my sytlesheet is working for flickr blog-posts. I am not sure whether I want to say good-bye to the great NextGEN Gallery plug-in for WordPress I have been using all those years now. Should I really switch to flickr? What do you think?

And by the way: You just witness a major design-wise relaunch of the Promenade Blog, after the years I got a little bored with the standard visual appearance of this WordPress blog, so I stared in August 2007 a major redesign. But today I finally finished it in a couple of hours for the next couple of years. Although everything seems okay on first glance, there might happen some strange layouts on some pages — to be resolved soon.

This quote originally comes from Stefan Sagmeister’s little story he told the listeners in his lecture in Salzburg this March and is more or less the motto of my business trip to Salzburg, where I was photographing for the Salzburg Seminar, as you already know. And it was great! Meeting so many very interesting, very nice and very important personalities definitely is as enriching as it is exciting. And it was a good way to brush up my English because of the high intellectual level of the discussions and lectures I had to photograph. Below is a selection of the best photographs just for you. I will release some of them into public domain later on because Wikipedia is missing many of the speakers’ photographs.

Thanks to Andrew Phelps who talked to program director Benjamin Glahn who then called me I got this very special job. Because of my broken car I was forced to take the first train to Salzburg in the morning and spent the four hours with a big Chinese family traveling through Europe, then take a taxi to the beautiful Schloss Leopoldskron where the seminars are taking place since 1947 (if I am not mistaken). Only ten minutes after my arrival I was briefed and taking photos like mad in the big conference hall. I was so nervous that I would shoot too less photos so I made sure there definitely were too many.

I felt lucky being able to move around while the faculty speakers where holding their speeches or discussing with the about fifty fellows in the room who were mostly highly respected lawyers, all of them specialized in human rights. And there were damn interesting speeches held and discussions made. On one hand I really was a little annoyed that I had to move around all the time worrying about good photos instead of sitting there just listening, on the other hand I felt incredible dumb because often I didn’t really know what something that’s been said was about; especially the one time when John Bellinger III, Senior law adviser of Condoleezza Rice and a highly skilled speaker, once asked his listeners who of them knew about article three of the Geneva Convention in detail. All hands were up. I really was lucky that I was not part of the audience that moment. Then he went on on how to differentiate between the terms “lawful” and “unlawful”. Now I really consider to subscribe the Herald Tribune for a few weeks to build up some knowledge on international affairs and foreign policy.

On my second day I was prepared for doing Lisa’s favor. I grabbed an Seminar Salzburg note pad and waited for my employer, program director Benjamin W. Glahn, to finish talking with her. My hands were already shaking. Until he was finished I took some shaken, not usable photos and after a few seconds I shyly approached the grand dame of justice.
“Justice O’Connors?”
(I know, I know, her name is O’Connor instead of O’Connors. But I was sooo very nervous!). She rose her head and looked at me. I took a deep breath. Now Yasunobu Sato, Professor at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, who sat next to her also looked at me.

I returned to the aisle between the desks when she began shuffling her notes, while I was still looking at her four lines. With my hands still shaky I couldn’t get a good picture the next five minutes. And unfortunately I had nothing to put the notepad with the autograph into so I was carrying and protecting it the whole day until I had a little time to put it in a safe place in my hotel room.

On the second day Nasra Hassan, currently director of the UN Information Service, held also a speech about the motivations of islamistic suicide bombers and what these groups strive for. She had her speech notes in written form, put on her glasses and now and then looked down although she is a marvelous speaker. When I was approaching her from the left for another couple of close-ups she interrupted the sentence she was just uttering but without a pause or a voice change: “I don’t want any photos to be taken with my glasses on”. She looked at me and seemed dead serious about it while seventy people were having a good laugh. I put my camera down and just listened until she was finished.
I was late for lunch after backing up my photos and she caught me in the library again. In perfect German she said to me:

Actually I still got the photos of Ms. Hassan with glasses on in case some of them are really good even though I have to take off her glasses in Photoshop then. But without editing they are doomed to never to be seen ever again.
This little special request by her was instantly picked up by the other peoples, fellows and faculty, and when I was trying to take some photos in the coffee break most of the people said “Oh no! Not with my glasses!”
Michael Hartmann, adviser to the attorney general of Afghanistan, instructed me before his speech not to take any photos of him below his chest where his quite impressive belly started. “These photos will go to my mother. I don’t want to make her sad.” he quipped and went on “Where other people have a six pack I have a whole chest”.

The worst part of it all was the obligatory group photograph. I’ve never had to cast so many people not blinking and easily to identify in a single photo. Luckily I didn’t have to arrange them myself. When the mass of people got arranged, Musa Salmanu, Staff Officer Second Grade Nigerian Air Force, handed me his Sony bridge camera that I could take the group photo with his camera too. And so did Suzannah Linton, associate professor and director LL.M program in human rights. I was a little afraid that more and more people would hand me their camera but it was only the two of them.
To make sure the group photo works out I shot several of them at different aperture stops in series to make sure that I would be able to paste the face of any person from another photo of the series, if it looked better and to get the exposure just right.
The worst part was telling seventy people so say “Cheese” the same time. After about fifteen pictures I made the requested photos with Musa’s and Suzannah’s camera and said a heart-felt “Thank you!” to all the people eager to be released for the buffet lunch. Musa also wanted me to take another photo of him and a man in a blue shirt. “Take one of me and the major, please!” he said and positioned himself next to Major William Austin, associate professor of law, USAF Academy.

But I was not free for lunch yet, because the faculty staff got positioned along the the lake. It was even harder in this group photo against the mountains of Salzburg and the beautiful lake behind the castle. Afterwards I shot the scene without people from the exact spot again at different lens stops that I could give the sky and mountains some details afterwards in Photoshop I ultimately didn’t anyway.

In general I shot about 1500 photos in the two days, working about nine hours every day but I don’t miss a single hour of them because it was incredibly interesting to get a deep insight into the politics and methods of Human Rights on a grand scale.

I had to promise Lisa to bring her an autograph of her idol Sandra Day O’Connor when I have the opportunity to. I just hope I won’t chicken out…

I better get some sleep because my train will leave in 3 hours… phew. See you in Salzburg!

On Tuesday I paid Foto Mayrhofer another visit and did some bulk shopping in photo equipment: Lisa bought some photo paper for her project in staged photography, I got myself two Ilfosol S developer packs, a wire release for my dear Mamiya RB 67 and -most importantly and most urgently- a Manfrotto tripod. Model #055CLB to be precise. And, boy, it wasn’t cheap but a bulky medium format camera does need a good tripod.

And finally I was able to shoot long time exposures with the Mamiya which I always anticipated because of the lovely large format of 6 x 7 cm.

A guide to Mamiya RB 67 long time exposures

It wasn’t easy finding out about the T setting on the lens. Long time ago I learned that it stands for tempus and is another kind of the B, the (Flash)Bulb setting. I even remembered that instead of holding the trigger down, tempus requires the trigger on the wire release to be pushed once to open the shutter, and then again to close the shutter. Not so with the Mamiya RB 67. So I decided to write this short guide, mainly for myself before I forget about it again.

1. Change the independent mirror release knob on the lens with the wire release socket from the red letter • N to the orange letter • M.
2. Now set the shutter to the desired speed, in this case to T.
3. Remove the slide from the magazine
4. Push the trigger. Because the Mamiya RB 67 doesn’t have a Mirror Up button, you have to do it this way. The shutter will remain closed.
5. When you feel ready push the trigger on the cable release
6. Count the exposure time
7. When finished pull the shutter cocking lever to close the shutter and to cock the mirror spring again
8. Put the dark slide back in place
9. Wind the lever on the film magazine

Followed by a fat car that nearly pushed me up the little road up the mountain I set the cam to ISO 100 and a small f-stop. The exposure times varied from a 1/20 to 1 second and so the picturesque forest scenes blurred on the CCD to impressions of itself rather than sharp documents. Usually I just delete blurry photos instantly but I stuck with those. Additionally a wonderful quote from Lisa about the photos.

The beauty of these pics is twofold: On one hand they remember you of the moment and atmosphere when they were taken, just like the other photographs. On the other hand they lead you to totally different associations because they are vague enough for that.

Hope, you like them too!