From Krystof with Love
In November 2012, I presented a paper on the uses of consumer RGB-D devices such as the Microsoft Kinect for computer vision research at the Advances in Depth Image Analysis and Applications - WDIA 2012 conference in Tsukuba, Japan… and then took the opportunity to travel around the country for a couple of extra weeks.
It was a great experience - Japan is a beautiful, unique place. Some of my favorite photos from the trip follow.
This story was originally published in the Mosaic Art & Literary Journal. It is a work of fiction set during the 2009 G20 Summit protests in London, where the accompanying photos were captured. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Camera – check.
24mm f/1.4 lens – check.
Three fully-charged battery packs – check.
Three formatted memory cards – check.
Lens brush – check.
Rock ‘n Roll.
I set out. It was nine o’clock, later than I had intended to leave, but still OK. The protests weren’t scheduled to start until after eleven, and even with the unavoidable traffic issues, I got to Cannon Street tube before ten. Bank, of course, was closed. Even before I managed to get out of the station, it was clear that I was in the right place. People wearing all sorts of costumes were trickling out into the street with me. I saw the scariest Mickey Mouse I had ever seen, a horrible beast with the jagged smile of a demon of avarice, big round ears, a polka-dot ribbon between them, and eyes full of burning rage. The sight so shook me I didn’t even manage to get my camera out. Happy Financial Fool’s.
Outside the lines of police were prominent. Walk this way, don’t walk that way, don’t ask questions. I got my camera. There wasn’t much action yet, but there were definitely enough characters. Everyone loves a picture of a lunatic.
After my year in London, I traveled through Europe before making my way back home.
I traveled mostly by bus from city to city, so in some countries all I saw was a small part of one city while elsewhere I saw more. In order, I went to:
Some of my favotire photos from the trip follow.
I spent the 2008-2009 academic year studying in the Computing program at Imperial College London. Here are some of my favorite photos I took around London and the south of England during that time.
I spent the summer of 2008 working in an NSF-funded summer research program studying the effects surface irregularities have on the properties of conductors for applications in very large-scale integration (VLSI). The program was co-administered by the University of California, Riverside and Tsinghua University in China.
For about month of the program, we worked out of Tsinghua University’s campus in Beijing - and this just happened to coincide with the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Here are some photo highlights from that time:
