Yesterday, I did my work from home on an Internet-connected computer.
Before I began my work yesterday, I enabled the “Screen Record” function of the computer’s Quicktime app.
I took the resulting 1-hour-and-9-minute screen recording and sped it up, resulting in a 30 second video.
So, that was a fun experiment in recording myself as I do various visual-computing tasks.
Today, I began more work of a similar nature.
Almost immediately, I was distracted by trying to find the right YouTube video to play in the background while I work.
I decided on Spotify and then did some more photoshop work.
I then got the idea to record my screen again, because I realized I was being kept honest by the idea of observation via screen recording.
I was being kept honest and on-task because I knew I’d eventually have to review my own actions when I reviewed the screen-recording video.
If I dawdled while I worked, that would mean a longer screen-recording video would be recorded, and that would mean more future work for me, to have to edit the footage later.
The point is:
Start recording yourself while working.
See what happens. 🙂
P.S. Immediately before posting this, I had turned on Quicktime’s “Screen Recording” feature.
I intended to post the screen-recording video of my writing this post, at the end of this post.
Turns out I hadn’t turned on the screen-recording feature after all.
Now that we know those two facts, let’s use a peanut butter cup wrapper to give our smartphone better close-focus abilities!
I’ve set up a few small dinosaur friends on a table. Every dinosaur is a different distance away from the lens, so the camera (operator) will have to choose which dinosaur will be in focus.
Here’s what it looks like when we focus on the green dinosaur, which is about 8 inches from the lens:
If the camera (operator) focuses the lens further into the background, then the blue dinosaur will come into focus, but this means that the green dinosaur will not be sharply focused.
Here’s what it looks like when we focus on the blue dinosaur, which is about 24 inches from the lens:
It is not possible for the smartphone lens to focus equally on the green dinosaur and the blue dinosaur.
How can all the dinosaurs come into focus?
We’ll need to use a peanut butter cup!
First, unwrap the peanut butter cup from its foil and look for tiny holes in the foil.
Center the candy-wrapper pinhole over the smartphone lens and bring it close enough to the lens so that an image appears on the smartphone screen.
All three dinosaurs are now all the same level of focus, but that focus is not particularly sharp.
In pinhole-photography terms, all three dinosaurs are now “equally unsharp”.
By pressing the pinhole right up over the smartphone lens, we’re creating a smaller opening for the light to enter the lens, also called an “aperture” or “f-stop”.
The small aperture means that more of the image appears to be “in focus”, relative to using a larger aperture on the same lens.
There is an ideal pinhole size for any given smartphone camera and it’s a good idea to try out several pinhole sizes to see which results in the sharpest (unsharpest?) image.
Below are the results of various other pinhole sizes: 1mm, .35mm, .25mm, .1mm, and .05mm
Unedited footage of all the pinholes, plus some bonus candy-wrapper pinholes: https://youtu.be/UFMNVIJ1bsk
