Martin Gordon's Blog

Growing Up Star Wars: 1977-1985

A nostalgic look back at the world-wide Star Wars phenomenon through the creativity of the first generation of young people to experience it. Vintage photographs and scans of childhood Star Wars drawings, costumes, toys, homemade crafts, birthday cakes, local showings and events ( and local ads for such ) and more. The focus is on the personal experience and the variation & customization that was common in the early days of Star Wars.

I was clearly born 10-15 years too late.

Can't say I want to write anything too substantive on these links, but I do want to get them out there anyway because they're cluttering up my tab bar.

Monsters of the Programming World is a neat little poster anthropomorphizing common programming errors. I've been meaning to pick this up for our office.

Jeffrey Friedl has developed a Lightroom export plugin for Flickr. I haven't had a chance to test it out yet, as I've shamefully not uploaded any pictures to Flickr this year, but it should shave off a few clicks in my workflow if it works well enough.

Ken Rockwell on How To Afford Anything. The great thing about this article is that Ken isn't a personal finance guru, he's a photographer. This article isn't coming from a "I want to be rich" perspective but more from a "I want cool cameras" perspective, which appeals to me greater than the usual run-of-the-mill personal finance article.

Fraser Speirs on his photo editing workflow. Fraser uses Aperture, so his workflow is a bit more flexible than what is allowed (or rather suggested) by Lightroom. Still, some of his ideas carry across between any such application. I particularly enjoyed his rating process, something I currently do without much thought.

I'm working on listening to all of Fred Wilson's Top 10 Albums of the Year. Music recommendations from a VC, who would have thought? Fred's musical tastes are a bit off from mine and listening to his picks is an interesting experience. I haven't gotten through the entire list, but I did grab a copy of the Kings of Leon's Because of the Times, his number one pick. There are some songs I can't stand to listen to, and although the album as a whole isn't memorable, it is very catchy. That is, I can remember parts of songs but I can't identify which song it is or if it's the same part of another song. My biggest disappointment has to be the lyrical work. There's just not a whole lot going on there unfortunately.

Technorati Tags: links, programming, bugs, poster, art, Flickr, Lightroom, photography, personal finance, Aperture, A VC, Fred Wilson, music, Kings of Leon, Because of the Times

De 7 A 11 Y De 15 A 17 H

Originally uploaded by Martin Gordon.

1st and 10

Originally uploaded by Martin Gordon.

As part of the Line (for Basketball season tickets), we went to Princeton last Saturday to watch the Quakers suffer their third OT loss in a row.

The rest of the photos from the game are here and some other photos from Friday night at the Line are here.

Technorati Tags: Penn, UPenn, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Princeton University, photography, football, Ivy League, Quakers, Tigers, Flickr

Child of the Corn

Originally uploaded by Martin Gordon.

This is one of my favorite pictures from the corn maze outside of Boston we went to when I visited over fall break a week and a half ago.

Very creepy and very fitting for Halloween IMHO.

Technorati Tags: Halloween, corn, corn maze, scary, photography, photos, travel, vacation, Boston

My friend and housemate, Brian Keller, took up the hobby of firedancing a few weeks ago and he put on his first semi-public performance on for us last night. I was able to get some pretty spectacular long exposure shots of him and they're up on Flickr. The photoset is available here.

Technorati Tags: firedancing, fire, dancing, firedance, dance, performance, hobby, philadelphia, upenn, penn, philly, University of Pennsylvania

Flickr thumbnails now show up on del.icio.us

Originally uploaded by Martin Gordon.

I just stumbled across a thumbnail on the del.icio.us popular list and discovered that bookmarking a photo page on Flickr shows the thumbnail in del.icio.us. I tried it myself with one of my own pictures and it worked just as well. Now all we need is for del.icio.us to read the caption/tags off of Flickr and apply them as del.icio.us tags.

Yay for two of Yahoo!'s acquisitions playing nice with each other!

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, del.icio.us, Flickr, photos, integration, Web 2.0, folksonomies, social bookmarking, tagging, bookmarks, thumbnails

Here are pictures of Tokyo and New York City utlizing High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging techniques, where multiple exposures of the same scene are taken so that you get much greater range of colors in your images. After combining images, you get all the details in the shadows while not having the rest of the scene blown out.

The images are very cool looking, haunting almost.

Technorati Tags: HDR, photography, imaging, images, High Dynamic Range

Last weekend I participated in the American Cancer Society's Relay For Life, an all-night event whose purpose is to raise money for cancer research, remember those lost to cancer and celebrate those who have survived.

The event was held at the University of Pennsylvania's historic Franklin Field and ran from 7pm Saturday night to 7am Sunday morning (11 hours). By my estimates, about 400 people participated and about 100 stayed through the entire thing.

You can view all 69 photos I took at the event here.

Technorati Tags: Relay For Life, American Cancer Society, ACS, cancer, Franklin Field, UPenn, Penn, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, charity, Sigma Nu, philanthropy

I got a message on Flickr from someone named Anne-Sophie asking for permission to use some of my photos from the Howie Day show last October:

Hi there,

I was wondering if I could possibly trouble you for some of the Howie Day photos you have from 10.07.05. I am interested in the ones with the beautiful lighting effects to possibly use for the lighting designer's portfolio.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers,

Anne-Sophie

Given that Adam Curry is in Amsterdam today to fight against a tabloid that published pictures from his Flickr photostream, I'm glad that someone actually took the time out to ask me if they could use my pictures even if I probably never would have found out that they had lifted them.

I thought that was kind of cool and of course I said yes! Here's the photoset if you're interested.

Technorati Tags: Flickr, Howie Day, lighting, photography, permission, copyright, Adam Curry, infringement, tabloids