Kevin Ludlow is a 45-year-old accomplished software developer, business manager, writer, musician, photographer, world traveler, and serial entrepreneur from Austin, Texas. He is also a former candidate for the Texas House of Representatives.
Please take a moment to view his complete resume for more information.
Note: the entirety of this website was architected and developed from the ground up exclusively by Kevin Ludlow.
This is what I spent my post-Christmas dinner with the family working on. I saw a hand-drawn version sort of like it on Reddit and thought I could run with the concept and practice some Photoshop.
In early 2008 I came across an interesting idea that Amazon had started working on called Mechanical Turk. The idea was pretty simple: rather than writing software that was capable of artificially intelligent tasks, it was instead plausible simply to pay people very small sums of money to perform very small tasks. This is what the Turk program did.
The Amazon system allowed developers like myself to create small programs that would integrate with their Turk API. In my case, I wrote a very simple program that would display a random photo from my collection and request that the user describe the photo in the text-box I provided to them.
All of this was spelled out on within my user space, but provided that the person described the photo in at least 10 words, they would be paid a sum of $0.01 (1 penny). I suspect that this type of thing is mostly aimed at people in English-speaking emerging markets around the world (India for example), but proved to be invaluable to me. On the initial 3 month run, I wound up having over 8,000 photos described.
Update March 3rd, 2012: I've done some additional exploring of this system and in the few years since I first started experimenting with it, Amazon has made huge strides. In 2008 their developer API was pretty cumbersome to figure out, but they've really managed to solve this by simplifying the submission process. The downside is that it requires a few extra steps on the developer's end, but the upside is the simplicity to understand how it all works and to begin a campaign. The dataset importation used to be automated, but now one just uploads a CSV file of the data. Again, it's an extra step, but is so simple to do that I can't really complain.
All that being said, I've recently launched another several thousand photos and had 100% of them described within just a few days. For the most part, the entries submitted were very good. I will likely do a full-scale launch within the next few weeks and have Amazon Turk workers detail ALL of my photo collection. This is a pretty mammoth amount of data processing that people will be doing for me, and I'm excited to think how it will change my search criteria.
Update October 28th, 2015(small political rant within): After many, many years of wonderful successes with the Mechanical Turk project, I decided that it was time to once again overhaul some of my older code. I spent several days rewriting a bunch of the internal mechanics of openFace (the software I designed that powers this entire website). Given the importance of this piece to me, I focused heavily on the Mechanical Turk processing. From a code point of view everything went great. As it happens though, there is now a community of Mechanical Turk "watchdogs" (they have no affiliation with Amazon by the way). This was an interesting experience for me.
The new scripts I wrote (to compliment the detailed classes I've already written) were probably a few thousand photos in when a small group of people (Californians as it happened) started sending me angry emails. In a nutshell, they told me that the price of each photo should be more like $0.30 - $0.40. Keep in mind it takes about 15 seconds to look at a picture and type a 10 word sentence about it. Always one to engage conflict, I tried reasoning with them. I explained that this was just a personal project and that I couldn't possibly spend that kind of money on it. At $0.01 - $0.02 per photo it costs me about $40.00 for 1,000 photos (the fees are over 100% at such a low rate). Still, when I process 8,000 photos it can add up. So while the fees would be a lot less at $0.30 per photo, 1,000 photos would wind up costing me nearly $400.00. It then follows that 8,000 photos would cost me about $3,200. I explained to this group that if it *did* cost that much, I simply wouldn't be able to use the service and then nobody would get my money. It's a hobby of mine to catalog my life and the time I share with those people important to me; it's not a business. It's all at a financial loss.
They weren't having it. They were angry and not shy about letting me know. But then I took a step back from their complaints and I realized that like most marketplaces, the people who are doing the work are extremely delighted to have a steady source of income coming in. Many of those people might live on just a few dollars per month and so the opportunity to make even $20.00 from me is huge to them. For some of them it can entirely change their quality of life and open new doors. Of course their lives are nothing like my own. I'm sad for that and would do most anything to change that. I'd sure as shit rather help a group of people from emerging countries like Brazil, India, China, etc. than have a bunch of people from California complain that I'm not doing enough to help THEM (while they sit in an air-conditioned Starbucks sipping lattes and yelling at me from behind their MacBook Pro).
So like so many things in life, once you tune out the background noise, the Mechanical Turk project continues to be pretty amazing. I'm delighted to give money to these people all around the world; they do a wonderful job for me.
JJ Baty is performing Ave Maria in the upcoming Kujda wedding. He's a well-trained opera singer and I have no doubt that he's going to kill it. But since he doesn't really want to do it A Cappella and doesn't want to use a tape, he asked if I could play a basic background accompaniment to it.
Since he lives in Houston and I live in Austin, I recorded this quick version just so that he had something to work with. It's FAR from intricate, but should suffice for what we're doing.
Many thanks to my good buddy Preston for lending me his cherished classical guitar.
On our way back from Orlando, I was showing Caroline some tricks for getting a little better at Photoshop. Unfortunately whenever I try to show anyone how to use Photoshop, particularly if I have my own computer with me, it just makes me want to play with it as well. Anyway, we started playing with a picture we had recently taken on our trip to Garner State Park of Brewster (her dog) standing on the hood of my car.
After about an hour of trimming, layering, and really not having any idea of what I wanted to do, I came up with an idea to create a simple two-tone picture out of the original. The image below is what resulted.
Brewster: 1) Caroline's Dog; 2) A former Austin city council member
As some of you already know, or have possibly noticed popping up on Facebook over the months, I have finally taken on the arduous task of digitizing and restoring all of my grandparent's (Momma and Poppa) old slides. In truth I actually started this project a few years ago, but was not satisfied with the quality of output that I getting and ultimately shelved the idea. A dear friend of mine, Mark Holzbach (http://www.austinforum.org/speakers/holzbach.html), was kind enough to provide me with his Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 and SF-210 Slide Feeder finally making the process both bearable and of exceptional quality. I am very pleased with the final result.
The complete collection is a little more than 6.50 GB. The file prefixes were consistent with how my grandfather (Poppa) had the boxes originally labeled and the slides were all scanned in the order that they appeared in the original carousels. There was no post-editing done to the scans (aside from the built-in Nikon/VueScan filtering) and so some are upside down, inverted, etc.
About the Slide Set
In total, there were 1,869 slides that were part of the collection. The date range of these slides appears to be from about 1973 - 1988. The locations are vast and span the North Atlantic, Canada, parts of New York and New Jersey, Eastern and Western Europe, Scandinavia, Russia, and Northern Africa (namely Egypt and Morocco). I would say that most of them take place on various cruises and other water transports, though certainly not exclusively. It's also worth noting that Poppa was very interested in shooting photos of locations and scenery as opposed to people. As it happens, he was actually very good at composition (in my opinion), but the downside is that probably less than 15% of the photos are actually of people. ...or at least people that are recognized by my family.
Digitization and Restoration
Poppa on a boat (7/26/1975) BEFORE infrared processing and and chrome color correction
Poppa on a boat (7/26/1975) AFTER infrared processing and and chrome color correction
The Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 allowed me to capture very high quality image data. I initially intended to scan all of the photos in RAW format, but ultimately decided against this calculating that the 500 GB or so of data that would be required would be very difficult to mobilize and would not justify the benefits given the otherwise VERY high quality of scanning. Instead I wound up scanning each slide at 4000 DPI and stored them in 100% uncompressed JPEG format. The lack of compression makes this more or less equivalent to TIFF data; there is no (or should not be) adjusting of the color pallet. The complete dataset wound up being 6.50 GB of JPEG data or about 3.477 MB per photo - essentially the same as any high resolution photography these days.
The scanner also utilizes a technology known as digital ICE (which incidentally was invented by a friend of Marks). Essentially after each slide was scanned, it would be rescanned using an infrared light. Unlike traditional white light used for scanning, infrared is capable of detecting depth. This is used to automatically detect dust and similar particulates as well as scratches on the physical film. Once the process finished, a proprietary software program I purchased (called VueScan) compared the infrared layer of data to the color layer and automatically eliminated the granular imperfections. The final step was to apply industry standard color corrections to the various types of slide film (Kodachrome, Ektochrome, etc.).
London Wellington Arch (4/17/76) BEFORE color correcting
London Wellington Arch (4/17/76) AFTER color correcting
The blended result of these technologies is a wonderful restoration of the entire photo set. Aside from physically improving the slides under a microscope, I'm not sure they could be restored or preserved any better.
I should also note that I did not use any sort of cropping on the slides. The reason for this is that I occasionally find the algorithms to detect the edges of slides not to be very good. I wanted to preserve the entirety of the slides and so you'll note that almost all of them have the slide frame scanned around them. If you zoom in and look very closely, you'll even see the frayed edges of the film against the slide frames. In the few occasional instances where no slide frame is visible, these were slides that simply had no lip.
Also, if you are interested in printing any of these photos, just open the photo in a graphic editor of your choosing and crop as desired. The quality is FAR great enough to produce very nice prints. Even 16x20 prints of these slides should print without any pixilation.
Storing
Some of Poppa's original notes
Several years ago I carefully moved all of the slides from their carousel trays to specialized air-tight acrylic slide containers. The slides have been placed back into these with all of the notes that Poppa kept on them (I will be getting these notes typed up sometime soon). The slide containers only hold up to 50 slides each, so there are quite a few of them. Each of these slide containers was then placed into air-tight photo boxes (available at craft stores such as Michael's). Upon the completion of my company warehouse (hopefully to be open in early summer 2012), I will be storing these slide boxes in a fireproof safe in my hidden room. There will be some irony should they burn, I realize this, but that's about as safe as I can think to make them.
Additional Photos
One of the air-tight acrylic slide boxes
I am still hoping to get any remaining family photos, slides, or the like from old boxes or books in order to have them digitized and add them to my collections. I would also like to note to anyone reading this that if you DO have photos in those old sticky-magnetic photo books, please note that the glues are only accelerating the destruction of the photos. You may want to consider removing them from those books (as I did for my parents 2 years ago) and storing them in proper photo containers until they can be digitally preserved. This is especially the case given the pervasiveness of modern scanning technologies and methodologies.
