Posts by Scott

Wired has a great feature on their blog called Beyond Apollo where they “chronicle space history through missions and programs that didn’t happen”. Some great imagery up there. Also, Spock. And look how new The Shuttle looks! Seems fake.

Beyond Apollo

The Sacramento Electronic Music Festival is looking to be the best yet with a great lineup this year including ISO50 favorite and Ghostly label-mate Mux Mool and my good friend and collaborator Dusty Brown. If you’re anywhere near Sacto you owe it to yourself to make it out. This is always a really fun event and it’s being held for the first time at Harlow’s, my favorite venue out there. Details follow.

The 3rd Annual Sacramento Electronic Music Festival – May 3rd, 4th and 5th
Harlow’s & Momo Lounge in midtown Sacramento. 21 and over – Tickets

2012 Lineup:

Shlohmo, Mux Mool, Dusty Brown, Death Grips, Light Year, Lorn, Salva, B.Bravo, Starship Connection, Jantsen, Raleigh Montcrief, DJ Nobody, Dibiase, D.A.M.B, Giraffage, DJ Whores, Yalls, iNi, CrookOne, Doombird, Satellites, Favors, Melee Beats, Little Foxes, Tha Fruitbat, El Conductor, James & Evander, Dolor, Bad Looks, adoptahighway, Chachi Jones, Young Aundee, Paper Pistols, Ryan Lindow, Eames, thriftcar

More Info

Mike Joyce has created an excellent — and rather extensive — collection of re-imagined vintage punk / indie rock posters in the International Typographic Style. Beautiful stuff, you can even score some prints from the Swissted Shop.

Swissted Via Aisle One

So as many of you long-time readers may have noticed the blog has been a little slow over the past six or so months, especially when commenting on posts. Well thanks to help from the brilliant Karl Peterson of Sidearm Design (who was also involved in the excellent Red Moon project) things are ticking along again. Commenting should be pretty speedy and overall site response time should be much quicker.

You may have also noticed that we had been posting less often over the past few months. Most of the team at one time or the other were on the road for the various Tycho tours and things slipped a bit. Although we will be touring extensively over the summer, we have some new people on board and have added some functionality on the admin side to make posting from the road a little easier, so the content should be flowing steadily again. We also have some new features (finally an HTML5 audio player for streaming playlists and music posts to iDevices etc.) and columns planned for the near future so keep an eye out for those.

As always we really appreciate your support and readership; we hope that in the years to come we can continue to grow our little community here.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFwqZ4qAUkE

I’ve seen some of this footage before but never heard the commentary. The narrators go into some really interesting detail on the tech involved in capturing the film footage of Shuttle launches. Most of the footage is for review purposes but some is purely documentary. All of the footage is beautiful though. It amazed me that they still used film all the way up until the end of the Shuttle program. They’re also shooting at higher frame rates so you get some great slow motion in there.

The lenses used range all the way up to a 4000mm, 250lb., catadioptric for the medium range tracking system. The Shuttle program was undoubtedly one of the greatest technical achievements humankind will ever produce (and I’m guessing the last of it’s scale), so I suppose it’s fitting that it was documented with a 100+ camera array of some of the most sophisticated optics available.

This was part of a DVD put together detailing some of the best footage from the later Shuttle launches.

Full video is here (be sure to switch to the 720p version!)

NASA has a great collection of historical photographs detailing their exploits over the years. Break out your Epsons and clean up your source imagery folder, these are all high-res and downloadable. Your tax dollars at work.

NASA Commons Image Archive

You may recall the post I did a while back on Daily Book Graphics. Well apparently I misidentified several of those images as vintage covers when in fact they were modern works by designer Julian Montague who is part of the Buffalo based design duo Frazer / Montague.

Julian Montague | Frazer / Montague Design

When I first saw the Icon 4×4 CJ series a while back I was temped to post but never got around to it. Seeing their new 1964 Bronco reproduction tipped the balance though and I had to get these up here. Icon create idealized versions of a few of the great 4×4 of yore (Bronco, CJ, and FJ) with a modern slant and an eye for detail. Don’t ask how much they cost unless you’re reading this on the front deck of a yacht or all your emails end with “Sent from a horse”. Nike was somehow involved. Also, you get a free shoe with one of them apparently.

More pics and some insight into the process of designing the Bronco can be found here

Icon 4×4

So I came across this great collection of vinatge ski posters a while back, but unfortunately they were all watermarked. I really hate watermarks and try to avoid posting images containing them at all costs; but these were just too good to pass up so you’ll have to try and see past the giant “ORIGINAL SKI POSTERS” and enjoy the underlying greatness. Growing up in Sacramento I always had a thing for 70s ski culture — Tahoe was a short drive up the mountain and a lot of the style and imagery tricked down into the valley. A lot of these perfectly capture the spirit of those times for me.

So, as you may have guessed, these are all from the Original Ski Posters site, where you can purchase many of them. Sadly, these watermarked Jpegs are as close as most of us will ever get to these as they start at around £500 and go upwards of £3000. there is an open image directory here where you can grab all the images with a utility like Downthemall. A couple seem ripe for watermark removal and some of the resolutions are high enough to get a good print out of.

Via Original Ski Posters site

Some vintage WWII / 40’s era Kodachromes. Always amazed at the color and detail of these. Images like these are a stark illustration of the limits of technology. Or at least of what we consider technological progress. True, photography has become more convenient and cost effective, increasing availability and enabling more people to participate. I think on the whole this is worth the cost of the death of film. But the sad truth is that the kinds of images you see above are a dying breed. In fact, I have not personally seen anything approaching this kind of quality come out recently (please correct me if I’m wrong, I’d love to see people doing stuff like this currently).

Although these shots are all beautiful, they don’t hold a candle to William Eggelston’s brilliant work which occupies the same kind of color space in my mind.

On a side note, I just got to Barcelona! One of my favorite cities, so happy to be able to relax here for a few days after our long European tour.

Via Shorpy