text:
Q: Is there any way not to use ApacheHttpClientFactory in Selenuim? Want to test the preinstalled APK, like a Caller and Calculator on the real Android device using Appium. All the tutorials show that I need to use URL.
dr = new AndroidDriver(new URL("http://192.168.43.242:4723/wd/hub"), capabilities);

But the ApacheHttpClient$Factory is deprecated in Selenium 3. How to solve?
Tried an emulator, not the real device, some wrappers with OkHTTP, can't launch properly
    @Test
    public void calculator() throws MalformedURLException {
        DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();
        capabilities.setCapability(MobileCapabilityType.DEVICE_NAME, "6PM0116B24000188");
        capabilities.setCapability("platformName", "android");
        capabilities.setCapability("appPackage", "com.android.calculator2");
        capabilities.setCapability("appActivity", ".Calculator");
        AndroidDriver dr = new AndroidDriver(new URL("http://192.168.43.242:4723/wd/hub"), capabilities);
    }

Test should run and Calculator app open.
but got the error:
    java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError:
     org/openqa/selenium/remote/internal/ApacheHttpClient$Factory
    at io.appium.java_client.remote.AppiumCommandExecutor.<init>(AppiumCommandExecutor.java:55)
    at io.appium.java_client.AppiumDriver.<init>(AppiumDriver.java:131)
    at io.appium.java_client.android.AndroidDriver.<init>(AndroidDriver.java:92)
    at CallingNumberTest.calculator(CallingNumberTest.java:17)
    at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
....

A: The issue was resolved by updating the java-client to the 6.1.o version.


At least one person was killed in a recent accident involving a semi-tanker vehicle carrying hundreds of gallons of gas near Valliant, Oklahoma earlier this week, an article of News Channel 4 reported on September 19.
Reports said state highway officials responded to the accident, which happened around U.S. 70 and Highway 98. Aside from emergency personnel, help from the crews of the Department of Environmental Quality were necessary after approximately 500 gallons of gasoline from the tanker spilled after falling to its side. Authorities confirmed one person was killed in the mishap, but they did not release the person's identity. A photo of the crash revealed that a pickup truck sustained significant damages after the accident. Traffic flow in the area was rerouted for several hours as crews worked their way through cleaning the spilled gas.
The Oklahoma wrongful death attorneys at the Abel Law Firm send their thoughts and condolences to all people affected by this accident.


And talk of spectacles and pills.
To hear such mortifying stuff.
Accept for once some serious lines.
Can look with joy on what is past.
To shine through life's declining part.
Reflecting on a life well spent?
Those whom you dragg'd from death before?
Preserving what it first creates.
Or forms reflected from a glass?
That fly, and leave no marks behind?
By food of twenty years ago?
It must a thousand times have died.
That no effects of food remain?
And still continued by the last?
That all effects of virtue end?
And join to fortify your heart.
And guide you to a better state.
Take pity on your pitying friends!
To fancy they can be unkind.
That I'm alive to tell you so.


Part 1 boards are behind me!
Well, I just finished part one of National Boards last month and let me tell you, it is nice to have that behind me. We all spent long days and late nights trying to cover everything possible that we thought may appear on the board exams. I started to become anxious a couple of days before and couldn't tell if I wanted them over with or thought I needed more time. Friday morning on the way to the exams I put in my Bob Marley CD and, as my four year old would say, "jammed out" on the way to school realizing I was excited to see what this was all about.
As it is with a lot of things the anticipation leading up to a big event is usually more nerve racking than the event itself. The same held true for boards. I expected to receive several pages of paper just filled with questions and was prepared to be completely overwhelmed. That wasn't the case. We received plenty of time to finish the exams and it turned out not to be so intimidating after all.
Saturday night, my husband and I had a get together and campfire at our home where we were able to unwind and enjoy time with family and friends. It is really hard to believe how fast the time has gone by since I started and here we are, planning our half-way party. I look forward to all that is ahead and can't wait to share my experiences with more prospective students in the upcoming trimesters!


text:
Claudio Verna
September 18 - December 20, 2018
© 2018 Cardi Gallery. Photo: Bruno Bani.
Claudio Verna in his studio.
© 2018 Cardi Gallery.
Cardi Gallery Milan is delighted to present a new exhibition of Claudio Verna, with both new and historical works. The exhibition is curated by Piero Tomassoni.
Claudio Verna (Guardiagrele, Italy, 1937) is one of the protagonists of 1970's Italian painting. Involved in the "Pittura Analitica" [Analytical Painting] or "Pittura-Pittura" [Painting-Painting] movement, Claudio Verna was part of a small group of artists who, towards the end of the 1960's, felt the need to return to painting, at a time when many considered it a dying form of art. These artists explored and analysed the very essence of painting, concentrating on its most fundamental constructive elements such as space, form, and colour.
A leading figure within the movement, Verna's works from 1967 to 1977 embody the essence of what could be considered the Italian response to Minimalism. From Hard-edge to Colour Field, one could draw many parallels with North American painting from the 1960's, including leading figures such as Frank Stella, Barnett Newman and Kenneth Noland. However, from 1978 onwards Verna achieved a different dimension, where the gesture is liberated and colour releases its internal energy.
This exhibition is Claudio Verna's first show at Cardi Gallery Milano, following a wide-ranging retrospective at the Gallery's London space. With 11 mostly large paintings ranging from 1967 to 2016 it illustrates how the artist, often referred to as "master of colour" by critics and curators, has approached the use of white in his works. For Verna, white is never a neutral pigment or a symbol of emptiness. In fact, it is the colour which contains all other colours within it; indeed, white light is made up of the whole spectrum of colours visible to the human eye, produced by the different wavelengths of sun rays.
As the curator of the exhibition Piero Tomassoni explains: "Verna's 'monochrome' paintings are never actually monochromatic; they always contain a diversity of colours which are juxtaposed, interlaced, and mixed together. In the 'white paintings', different tones emerge with time as the chemical properties of the acrylic varnish produce slight mutations over the years. What's more, their veiled white surfaces allow the iridescent substratum to vary in appearance through different light exposure and as the observer changes position in relation to the work. Equally, his 'black paintings', such as Aegizio '78, allow colours to resurface through embrasures opened on the chromatic layers underneath the dark canvas space. These works demonstrate the artist's acuity when it comes to the visual implications of format and brushstroke, as well as to light and form. These are integral facets of Verna's lifelong exploration into our perception of colour and the way in which we interact with it. The formal methodology and research used to create these series form a significant contribution to the general discourse of abstract painting, of which Verna continues to be an active protagonist."

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: MFMailComposeViewController won't appear in iOS8 I have an objective C program that has popover with a list of dates and two buttons "Done" and "Cancel".  When the user hits a date and then the done button, the popover is supposed to disappear and a MFMailViewController window populated with data from that date is supposed to appear.
When I run the program on an iPad with iOS 7, everything works fine - the popover disappears and the mail view appears with the data populated.  When I run it on an iPad with iOS 8.1, the popover disappears but the mail view does not appear.
Using NSLog output, I know that the iPad can send email, the correct date is getting to the method, the MFMailViewController object does exist, and it gets past the line that is supposed to present the controller.  But the controller doesn't appear.
Any help with this would be appreciated because tons of web searches have found nothing helpful.
The end of the method is:
NSLog(@"about to present the mail view");
if ([MFMailComposeViewController canSendMail] == YES){
    NSLog(@"can it email YES");
}
else {
    NSLog(@"can it email NO");
}
NSLog(@"the picker is %@",picker);
[self presentViewController:picker animated:NO completion:NULL];
NSLog(@"leaving method EmailDataFiles");

and the output from this code is:
about to present the mail view
can it email YES
the picker is <MFMailComposeViewController: 0x1616ac00>
leaving method EmailDataFiles

A: I don't know how you're initializing picker object but this works for me, put inside your if condition:
if ([MFMailComposeViewController canSendMail] == YES){
    NSLog(@"can it email YES");
    MFMailComposeViewController *mailViewController = [[MFMailComposeViewController alloc] init];

    mailViewController.mailComposeDelegate = self;
    [mailViewController setSubject:@"Subject"];
    [mailViewController setMessageBody:@"" isHTML:NO];
    mailViewController.modalPresentationStyle = UIModalPresentationFormSheet;

    [self presentModalViewController:mailViewController animated:YES];
}

A: I think it is a race condition.. the dismissPopover on the doneButton-action of popoverController and presentViewController of the picker are clashing..
Can you try if the below option works for you ?
    dispatch_after(dispatch_time(DISPATCH_TIME_NOW, (int64_t)(0.3 * NSEC_PER_SEC)), dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
        [self presentViewController:picker animated:NO completion:NULL];
    });

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Journalism and Mass Communication Faculty HandbookAll www.kent.edu
Journalism and Mass Communication Faculty Handbook
Matters of School Governance and Related Procedures
Close Matters of School Governance and Related Procedures Overview
Revision of the Handbook
Teaching Assignments and Workload Including Workload Equivalencies and Related Procedures
Close Teaching Assignments and Workload Including Workload Equivalencies and Related Procedures Overview
Faculty Instructional, Professional and Ethical Responsibilities
Reappointment, Tenure, Promotion for Tenure-Track and Full Time Non-Tenure Track Faculty
Criteria, Performance Expectations and School Procedures Relating to Merit Awards
Close Criteria, Performance Expectations and School Procedures Relating to Merit Awards Overview
Other School Guidelines
Close Other School Guidelines Overview
Structure and Organization of the School
Close Appendix Overview
Graduate Faculty Membership
1. Graduate faculty membership shall be assigned to those faculty members with appropriate educational backgrounds, who have produced scholarly/creative activity of sufficient quality and consistency to merit professional recognition and who are effective in providing the appropriate training for graduate students (or have the potential for providing such training).
"Appropriate educational background," as it relates to the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, normally shall mean possession of the doctorate or terminal master's degree. It also may mean possession of a non-terminal master's degree with significant professional experience. Appropriate degrees vary within mass media-related disciplines and across the country, depending upon the emphases of the program and the academic/professional expertise of the faculty member.
Scholarly/creative activity of sufficient quality to merit professional recognition as it relates to JMC should be interpreted through Tenure and Promotion criteria described in this section.
Graduate Faculty Status for Kent Campus Faculty Members
Graduate Faculty status for Kent Campus faculty members is obtained by preparing documentation (application and supporting data sheet) and submitting it to the Graduate Faculty Committee of the School for evaluation and recommendation to the Director, who in turn recommends to the College Dean and to the Associate Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies.
2. The following statuses may be recommended for a graduate faculty member:
a. Associate Member, Level 1 (A1): May teach graduate courses and serve on master's thesis and project committees.
b. Full Member, Level 1 (F1): May do the above and may direct projects and comprehensive exams at the master's level. Before serving as a sole director of a project, the member must first co-direct two projects with a graduate faculty member eligible to be the sole director of a project. Before serving as a sole director of an exam, the member must first co-direct two exams with a graduate faculty member eligible to be the sole director of an exam.
c. Full Member, Level 2 (F2): May do the above and may direct theses. Before serving as a sole director of a thesis, the member must first co-direct two theses with a graduate faculty member eligible to be the sole director of a thesis.
d. Full Member, Level 3 (F3): May do the above and may serve on doctoral committees and co-direct doctoral dissertations.
e. Full Member, Level 4 (F4): May do the above and may direct a doctoral dissertation.
Criteria for Membership in the Graduate Faculty
General criteria for membership is set forth in the University Policy Register (6-15.1).
1. In JMC, a Full Member (Level F1) of the Graduate Faculty:
a. Must possess a doctorate or other appropriate terminal degree and demonstrate the potential for substantial scholarly research or creative activity, or
b. Must possess a master's degree and significant professional experience and a record of substantial and sustained professional publication or creative activity, or
c. Must possess a bachelor's degree, along with significant and prominent professional experience in his or her field and an outstanding record of professional publication or creative activity.
2. A Full Member (Level F2) of the Graduate Faculty:
a. Must hold a doctorate or equivalent terminal degree appropriate to the faculty member's teaching and research discipline, and must demonstrate a substantial and sustained record of appropriate scholarly research or creative activity, or
b. Must hold a master's degree for which a thesis was written, along with significant professional experience in his or her field, and must demonstrate a substantial and sustained record of appropriate scholarly research or creative activity.
a. Must meet all criteria for Level F2, and
b. Must demonstrate a significant record of graduate teaching, advising, and research direction, including experience in directing or co-directing graduate-student research, and
c. Must have demonstrated significant scholarly or creative activity in the past five years, and
d. Must demonstrate a significant record of professional involvement.
b. Must demonstrate a significant record of research direction, including experience in directing or co-directing graduate student research, and
c. Must demonstrate a current and continuing record of scholarly or creative activity, and
d. Must demonstrate a continuous record of significant professional involvement.
5. An Associate Member of the Graduate Faculty:
b. Must possess a master's degree and significant professional experience, and demonstrate the potential for substantial scholarly or professional research or creative activity, or
c. Must possess a bachelor's degree plus significant and prominent professional experience and must demonstrate the potential for outstanding professional publication or creative activity.
6. Temporary Graduate Faculty Member: This status shall be assigned to a faculty member whose participation in the graduate program is desired by the graduate department for a limited period or for a limited objective. Normally, this status should be assigned to lead to the appropriate instruction of a graduate course for a semester or appropriate service on a graduate examination committee, a thesis committee, or a dissertation committee. Upon the completion of the temporary assignment, the status of Temporary Graduate Faculty Member is withdrawn.
Reappointment for Tenure-Track Faculty
Tolling Policy
Tenure and Promotion for Tenure-Track Faculty
Criteria for Tenure and Promotion for Tenure-track Faculty
Negative Decisions on Reappointment, Tenure and Promotion
Full Time Non-Tenure Track Appoint, Renewal and Promotion
Criteria for Promotion of Full Time Non-Tenure Track Faculty
Other Faculty Personnel Actions
Appointment and Employment Procedure and Regulations of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Faculty Additions and Replacements
Letters of Appointment
Summer Teaching
Evaluation of Teaching
Faculty Grievance and Appeals


text:
Lotus subbiflorus, le lotier hispide ou lotier velu, est une plante herbacée de la famille des Fabaceae.

Synonyme :
 Lotus hispidus Desf. ex DC., 1805

Liens externes

  - synonyme

 Site de l'INRA

Espèce d'Angiospermes (nom scientifique)
Fabaceae

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Made this for a client who collects and displays knives. Case is made of Red Oak with glass front. All knives are held in place with rare earth magnets and can be removed. The knives were purchased in bulk from a TV show.
Very nice case you made for him!!
Very nice case.. what TV show or should I ask..?
Hi glen, believe it or not it was called "The Knife Show", try searching your TV Guide for Frost Cutlery, they produce all the knives that are sold. I'm not sure about availability in Canada.


The dama gazelle, or mhorr gazelle is a species of gazelle which is listed as being critically endangered. It lives in Africa in the Sahara desert and the Sahel. This critically endangered species has disappeared from most of its former range due to overhunting and habitat loss, and natural populations only remain in Chad, Mali, and Niger.


Amazing National Parks around the World!
With the changing climate and conditions all around the globe, finding peaceful corners where you can enjoy the beauty and music of nature has almost become difficult, Just like some animal or bird at the merge of extinction. In such harsh conditions, National Parks around the world are the only places which have kept the wilderness alive. Several life forms and unseen species still ponder around in such parks keeping alive the beauty of nature.
Let us take a walk-through of such amazing National Parks!
Etosha National Park – Africa being a home for some of the most rarest of rare species of animal and birds is a hub for national parks and the best among them is the Etosha National park situated in Nambia.
Corbett National Park – One of the most famous National Parks where people from all around the Globe come in search for tigers and species is the Corbett national park, situated in Nainital, India.
Plitvice Lakes National Park – Situated in Croatia, this is a spectacular collection of sixteen emerald and turquoise lakes connected to each other with a series of waterfalls.
Serengeti National Park – Another Safari National Park situated in Tanzania, Africa is famous for its annual wildebeest shift, ie the worlds biggest migration on groups of animals.
Tulum National Park– The last National park we will take a walk around today is the Tulum, Located in Mexico. Some ancient founding and a lot of beaches home for turtles and its species, this is what the place is full of.
Previous PostTrip to Himachal PradeshNext PostRishikesh and Rafting – Fever Isn't over Yet!


Whether or not you are interested in studying how you can grow to be a fashion designer or simply need to be taught a bit more concerning the business typically, one of many first steps you're going to have to take is to coach your self on the fashion designer icons that are out there. During this period, great ideas about fashion began arising within the lives of great men and women who later develop into well-known fashion designers. I found that women's merchandise (handbags) usually fetched the best "resale" costs, and thus profits.
Evidently, the Indian market has not made a strong stand and hence it's troublesome to make Indian brands that may compete with global brands in India. The people of Venezuela are very conscious about the best way they dress and look, and hence great care is taken to stay abreast with the changing fashion tendencies.
Many administration consultants and professionals believe that the Indian fashion industry might be boosted if the new comers are paid proper attention. Designers have a elementary function to play in the future of Indian fashion situation. Subtle stitching machines and different instruments have been invented for mass manufacturing of fashion merchandise.
Here is a brief list: Chanel Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel (1883-1971) created female fashion that supplied the sensation of luxury and mixed conventional women's clothes with kinds, fabrics, and articles of clothing used by males. The fashion industry in the trendy times is transferring at a very excessive pace.
Not too long ago, a report acknowledged that the Indian fashion business can improve from its web value of Rs 200 crore to Rs 1,000 crore within the next 5 to 10 years. Within the 50s, 60s and 70s, the Indian fashion scenario wasn't exactly colorless. The Black Expo Summer time Celebration, Indiana's annual black tradition competition that includes free concert events, celebrity cameos and one fierce fashion present, kicks off Thursday at the Conference Heart.


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text:
Will "The Mandalorian" Revolutionise Filmmaking?
September 21, 2020 September 24, 2020 neilosemanawards, cinematography, green screen, LED, lighting, long-form, Star Wars, tv, VFX, virtual production, VOD, volume
Last week, Greig Fraser, ASC, ACS and Baz Idoine were awarded the Emmy for Outstanding Cinematography for a Single-camera Series (Half-hour) for The Mandalorian. I haven't yet seen this Star Wars TV series, but I've heard and read plenty about it, and to call it a revolution in filmmaking is not hyperbole.
Half of the series was not shot on location or on sets, but on something called a volume: a stage with walls and ceiling made of LED screens, 20ft tall, 75ft across and encompassing 270° of the space. I've written before about using large video screens to provide backgrounds in limited aways, outside of train windows for example, and using them as sources of interactive light, but the volume takes things to a whole new level.
In the past, the drawback of the technology has been one of perspective; it's a flat, two-dimensional screen. Any camera movement revealed this immediately, because of the lack of parallax. So these screens tended to be kept to the deep background, with limited camera movement, or with plenty of real people and objects in the foreground to draw the eye. The footage shown on the screens was pre-filmed or pre-rendered, just video files being played back.
The Mandalorian's system, run by multiple computers simultaneously, is much cleverer. Rather than a video clip, everything is rendered in real time from a pre-built 3D environment known as a load, running on software developed for the gaming industry called Unreal Engine. Around the stage are a number of witness cameras which use infra-red to monitor the movements of the cinema camera in the same way that an actor is performance-captured for a film like Avatar. The data is fed into Unreal Engine, which generates the correct shifts in perspective and sends them to the video walls in real time. The result is that the flat screen appears, from the cinema camera's point of view, to have all the depth and distance required for the scene.
The loads are created by CG arists working to the production designer's instructions, and textured with photographs taken at real locations around the world. In at least one case, a miniature set was built by the art department and then digitised. The scene is lit with virtual lights by the DP – all this still during preproduction.
The volume's 270° of screens, plus two supplementary, moveable screens in the 90° gap behind camera, are big enough and bright enough that they provide most or all of the illumination required to film under. The advantages are obvious. "We can create a perfect environment where you have two minutes to sunset frozen in time for an entire ten-hour day," Idoine explains. "If we need to do a turnaround, we merely rotate the sky and background, and we're ready to shoot!"
Traditional lighting fixtures are used minimally on the volume, usually for hard light, which the omni-directional pixels of an LED screen can never reproduce. If the DPs require soft sources beyond what is built into the load, the technicians can turn any off-camera part of the video screens into an area of whatever colour and brightness are required – a virtual white poly-board or black solid, for example.
A key reason for choosing the volume technology was the reflective nature of the eponymous Mandalorian's armour. Had the series been shot on a green-screen, reflections in his shiny helmet would have been a nightmare for the compositing team. The volume is also much more actor- and filmmaker-friendly; it's better for everyone when you can capture things in-camera, rather than trying to imagine what they will look like after postproduction. "It gives the control of cinematography back to the cinematographer," Idoine remarks. VR headsets mean that he and the director can even do a virtual recce.
The Mandalorian shoots on the Arri Alexa LF (large format), giving a shallow depth of field which helps to avoid moiré problems with the video wall. To ensure accurate chromatic reproduction, the wall was calibrated to the Alexa LF's colour filter array.
Although the whole system was expensive to set up, once up and running it's easy to imagine how quickly and cheaply the filmmakers can shoot on any given "set". The volume has limitations, of course. If the cast need to get within a few feet of a wall, for example, or walk through a door, then that set-piece has to be real. If a scene calls for a lot of direct sunlight, then the crew move outside to the studio backlot. But undoubtedly this technology will improve rapidly, so that it won't be long before we see films and TV episodes shot entirely on volumes. Perhaps one day it could overtake traditional production methods?
For much more detailed information on shooting The Mandalorian, see this American Cinematographer article.
5 Steps to Lighting a Forest at Night
March 9, 2020 May 20, 2020 neilosemancinematography, fluorescent, HMI, LED, lighting, night ext, night shooting, smoke
EXT. FOREST - NIGHT
A simple enough slug line, and fairly common, but amongst the most challenging for a cinematographer. In this article I'll break down into five manageable steps my process of lighting woodlands at night.
1. Set up the moon.
Forests typically have no artificial illumination, except perhaps practical torches carried by the cast. This means that the DP will primarily be simulating moonlight.
Your "moon" should usually be the largest HMI that your production can afford, as high up and far away as you can get it. (If your production can't afford an HMI, I would advise against attempting night exteriors in a forest.) Ideally this would be a 12K or 18K on a cherry-picker, but in low-budget land you're more likely to be dealing with a 2.5K on a triple wind-up stand.
Why is height important? Firstly, it's more realistic. Real moonlight rarely comes from 15ft off the ground! Secondly, it's hard to keep the lamp out of shot when you're shooting towards it. A stand might seem quite tall when you're right next to it, but as soon as you put it far away, it comes into shot quite easily. If you can use the terrain to give your HMI extra height, or acquire scaffolding or some other means of safely raising your light up, you'll save yourself a lot of headaches.
In this shot from "The Little Mermaid" (dir. Blake Harris), a 12K HMI on a cherry-picker creates the shafts of moonlight, while another HMI through diffusion provides the frontlight. (This frontlight was orange to represent sunrise, but the scene was altered in the grade to be pure night.)
The size of the HMI is of course going to determine how large an area you can light to a sufficient exposure to record a noise-free image. Using a good low-light camera is going to help you out here. I shot a couple of recent forest night scenes on a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, which has dual native ISOs, the higher being 3200. Combined with a Speedbooster, this camera required only 1 or 2 foot-candles of illuminance, meaning that our 2.5K HMI could be a good 150 feet away from the action. (See also: "How Big a Light do I Need?")
2. Plan for the reverse.
A fake moon looks great as a backlight, but what happens when it comes time to shoot the reverse? Often the schedule is too tight to move the HMI all the way around to the other side, particularly if it's rigged up high, so you may need to embrace it as frontlight.
Frontlight is generally flat and undesirable, but it can be interesting when it's broken up with shadows, and that's exactly what the trees of a forest will do. Sometimes the pattern of light and dark is so strong and camouflaging that it can be hard to pick out your subject until they move. One day I intend to try this effect in a horror film as a way of concealing a monster.
One thing to look out for with frontlight is unwanted shadows, i.e. those of the camera and boom. Again, the higher up your HMI is, the less of an issue this will be.
If you can afford it, a second HMI set up in the opposite direction is an ideal way to maintain backlight; just pan one off and strike up the other. I've known directors to complain that this breaks continuity, but arguably it does the opposite. Frontlight and backlight look very different, especially when smoke is involved (and I'll come to that in a minute). Isn't it smoother to intercut two backlit shots than a backlit one and frontlit one? Ultimately it's a matter of opinion.
An example of cheated moonlight directions in "His Dark Materials" – DP: David Luther
3. Consider Ground lights.
One thing I've been experimenting with lately is ground lights. For this you need a forest that has at least a little undulation in its terrain. You set up lights directly on the ground, pointed towards camera but hidden from it behind mounds or ridges in the deep background.
Detail from one of my 35mm stills: pedestrians backlit by car headlights in mist. Shot on Ilford Delta 3200
I once tried this with an HMI and it just looked weird, like there was a rave going on in the next field, but with soft lights it is much more effective. Try fluorescent tubes, long LED panels or even rows of festoon lights. When smoke catches them they create a beautiful glow in the background. Use a warm colour to suggest urban lighting in the distance, or leave it cold and it will pass unquestioned as ambience.
Put your cast in front of this ground glow and you will get some lovely silhouettes. Very effective silhouettes can also be captured in front of smoky shafts of hard light from your "moon".
4. Fill in the faces.
All of the above looks great, but sooner or later the director is going to want to see the actors' faces. Such is the cross a DP must bear.
On one recent project I relied on practical torches – sometimes bounced back to the cast with silver reflectors – or a soft LED ball on a boom pole, following the cast around.
Big-budget movies often rig some kind of soft toplight over the entire area they're shooting in, but this requires a lot of prep time and money, and I expect it's quite vulnerable to wind.
A recipe that I use a lot for all kinds of night exteriors is a hard backlight and a soft sidelight, both from the same side of camera. You don't question where the sidelight is coming from when it's from the same general direction as the "moon" backlight. In a forest you just have to be careful not to end up with very hot, bright trees near the sidelight, so have flags and nets at the ready.
This shot (from a film not yet released, hence the blurring) is backlit by a 2.5K HMI and side-lit by a 1×1 Aladdin LED with a softbox, both from camera right.
5. Don't forget the Smoke.
Finally, as I've already hinted, smoke is very important for a cinematic forest scene. The best options are a gas-powered smoke gun called an Artem or a "Tube of Death". This latter is a plastic tube connected to a fan and an electric smoke machine. The fan forces smoke into the tube and out of little holes along its length, creating an even spread of smoke.
A Tube of Death in action on the set of "The Little Mermaid"
All smoke is highly suspectible to changes in the wind. An Artem is easier to pick up and move around when the wind changes, and it doesn't require a power supply, but you will lose time waiting for it to heat up and for the smoke and gas canisters to be changed. Whichever one you pick though, the smoke will add a tremendous amount of depth and texture to the image.
Overall, nighttime forest work scenes may be challenging, but they offer some of the greatest opportunities for moody and creative lighting. Just don't forget your thermals and your waterproofs!
6 Tips for Making DIY Lighting Look Pro
August 6, 2018 August 8, 2018 neilosemanbounce, cinematography, diffusion, DIY rigs, flags, halogen, LED, lighting, natural light, practicals, tips, tungsten
Good lighting can boost the production values of a film tremendously, making the difference between an amateur and a professional-looking piece. For filmmakers early in their careers, however, the equipment typically used to achieve these results can be prohibitively expensive. Far from the Hollywood productions attended by trucks full of lights, a micro-budget film may be unable to rent even a single HMI. Do not despair though, as there are ways to light scenes well without breaking the bank. Here are my top six tips for lighting on the cheap.
1. Make the most of natural light
Guesstimating the sun path on location
The hardest shots to light without the proper equipment are wide shots. Where a fully-budgeted production would rig Maxi Brutes on cherry-pickers, or pound HMIs through windows, a filmmaker of limited means simply won't have access to the raw power of such fixtures. Instead, plan your day carefully to capture the wide shots at the time when natural light gives you the most assistance. For a day interior, this means shooting when the sun is on the correct side of the building.
See also: "Sun Paths"
2. Keep L.E.D.s to the background
£2 LED camping light
There are a plethora of LED fixtures on the market, designed for all kinds of applications, some of them very reasonably priced. It might be tempting to purchase some of these to provide your primary illumination, but I advise against it. Cheap LED units (and fluorescents) have a terrible Colour Rendering Index (CRI), making for unnatural and unappealing skintones. Such units are therefore best restricted to backgrounds, accent lighting and "specials". For example, I purchased a little LED camping light from a charity shop for about £2, and I often use it to create the blue glow from computer screens or hang it from the ceiling to produce a hint of hair-light.
See also my article on LEDs from my "Know Your Lights" series.
3. Key with tungsten or halogen
Halogen floodlight
By far the best solution for a high output, high CRI, low cost key is a halogen floodlight; 500W models are available for as little as £5. Their chief disadvantage is the lack of barn doors, making the light hard to control, though if you can stretch to a roll of black wrap you can fashion a kind of snoot. Alternatively, consider investing in a secondhand tungsten movie fixture. With many people switching to LEDs, there are plenty of old tungsten units out there. Try to get a reputable brand like Arri or Ianiro, as some of the unbranded units available on Ebay are poorly wired and can be unsafe.
See also: "DIY Interview Lighting for the 'Ren' EPK"
4. Control the light
Lace curtains used to break up light in a Camerimage workshop last year
Flooding a halogen light onto a scene is never going to look good, but then the same is often true of dedicated movie fixtures. Instead it's more how you modify the light that creates the nuanced, professional look. Improvise flags from pieces of cardboard to stop the light spilling into unwanted places – but be VERY careful how close you put them to a tungsten or halogen source, as these get extremely hot. For example, when shooting indoors, flag light off the background wall (especially if it's white or cream) to help your subject stand out.
See also "Lighting Micro-sets" for an example of this.
5. Soften the light
Almost all cinematographers today prefer the subtlety of soft light to the harshness of hard light. You can achieve this by bouncing your fixture off a wall or ceiling, or a sheet of polystyrene or card. Or you could hang a white bedsheet or a shower curtain in front of the light as diffusion, but again be sure to leave a safe distance between them. Professional collapsible reflectors are available very cheaply online, and can be used in multiple ways to diffuse or reflect light.
Hot tub cover = bounce board. Towel = flag
See also: "How to Soften Harsh Sunlight with Tinfoil and a Bedsheet"; and to read more about the pictured example: "Always Know Where Your Towel Is"
6. Make use of practicals
Black-wrapped ceiling light
Finally, don't be afraid to use existing practical lighting in your scene. Turning on the main overhead light usually kills the mood, but sometimes it can be useful. You can generate more contrast and shape by covering up the top of the lampshade, thus preventing ceiling bounce, or conversely use the ceiling bounce to give some ambient top-light and cover the bottom of the lampshade to prevent a harsh hotspot underneath it. Table lamps and under-cupboard kitchen lights can add a lot of interest and production value to your backgrounds. If possible, swap out LED or fluorescent bulbs for conventional tungsten ones for a more attractive colour and to eliminate potential flickering on camera.
See also: "5 Tips for Working with Practicals", and for an example of the above techniques, my blog from day two of the Forever Alone shoot.
May 4, 2018 June 11, 2021 neilosemancolour, colour temperature, CRI, fluorescent, gaffering, HMI, LED, light, lighting, lighting kit, science
Many light sources we come across today have a CRI rating. Most of us realise that the higher the number, the better the quality of light, but is it really that simple? What exactly is Colour Rendering Index, how is it measured and can we trust it as cinematographers? Let's find out.
What is C.R.I.?
CRI was created in 1965 by the CIE – Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage – the same body responsible for the colour-space diagram we met in my post about How Colour Works. The CIE wanted to define a standard method of measuring and rating the colour-rendering properties of light sources, particularly those which don't emit a full spectrum of light, like fluorescent tubes which were becoming popular in the sixties. The aim was to meet the needs of architects deciding what kind of lighting to install in factories, supermarkets and the like, with little or no thought given to cinematography.
As we saw in How Colour Works, colour is caused by the absorption of certain wavelengths of light by a surface, and the reflection of others. For this to work properly, the light shining on the surface in the first place needs to consist of all the visible wavelengths. The graphs below show that daylight indeed consists of a full spectrum, as does incandescent lighting (e.g. tungsten), although its skew to the red end means that white-balancing is necessary to restore the correct proportions of colours to a photographed image. (See my article on Understanding Colour Temperature.)
Fluorescent and LED sources, however, have huge peaks and troughs in their spectral output, with some wavelengths missing completely. If the wavelengths aren't there to begin with, they can't reflect off the subject, so the colour of the subject will look wrong.
Analysing the spectrum of a light source to produce graphs like this required expensive equipment, so the CIE devised a simpler method of determining CRI, based on how the source reflected off a set of eight colour patches. These patches were murky pastel shades taken from the Munsell colour wheel (see my Colour Schemes post for more on colour wheels). In 2004, six more-saturated patches were added.
The maths which is used to arrive at a CRI value goes right over my head, but the testing process boils down to this:
Illuminate a patch with daylight (if the source being tested has a correlated colour temperature of 5,000K or above) or incandescent light (if below 5,000K).
Compare the colour of the patch to a colour-space CIE diagram and note the coordinates of the corresponding colour on the diagram.
Now illuminate the patch with the source being tested.
Compare the new colour of the patch to the CIE diagram and note the coordinates of the corresponding colour.
Calculate the distance between the two sets of coordinates, i.e. the difference in colour under the two light sources.
Repeat with the remaining patches and calculate the average difference.
Here are a few CRI ratings gleaned from around the web:
Source CRI
Sodium streetlight -44
Standard fluorescent 50-75
Standard LED 83
LitePanels 1×1 LED 90
Arri HMI 90+
Kino Flo 95
Tungsten 100 (maximum)
Problems with C.R.I.
There have been many criticisms of the CRI system. One is that the use of mean averaging results in a lamp with mediocre performance across all the patches scoring the same CRI as a lamp that does terrible rendering of one colour but good rendering of all the others.
Demonstrating the non-continuous spectrum of a fluorescent lamp, versus the continuous spectrum of incandescent, using a prism.
Further criticisms relate to the colour patches themselves. The eight standard patches are low in saturation, making them easier to render accurately than bright colours. An unscrupulous manufacturer could design their lamp to render the test colours well without worrying about the rest of the spectrum.
In practice this all means that CRI ratings sometimes don't correspond to the evidence of your own eyes. For example, I'd wager that an HMI with a quoted CRI in the low nineties is going to render more natural skin-tones than an LED panel with the same rating.
I prefer to assess the quality of a light source by eye rather than relying on any quoted CRI value. Holding my hand up in front of an LED fixture, I can quickly tell whether the skin tones looks right or not. Unfortunately even this system is flawed.
The fundamental issue is the trichromatic nature of our eyes and of cameras: both work out what colour things are based on sensory input of only red, green and blue. As an analogy, imagine a wall with a number of cracks in it. Imagine that you can only inspect it through an opaque barrier with three slits in it. Through those three slits, the wall may look completely unblemished. The cracks are there, but since they're not aligned with the slits, you're not aware of them. And the "slits" of the human eye are not in the same place as the slits of a camera's sensor, i.e. the respective sensitivities of our long, medium and short cones do not quite match the red, green and blue dyes in the Bayer filters of cameras. Under continuous-spectrum lighting ("smooth wall") this doesn't matter, but with non-continuous-spectrum sources ("cracked wall") it can lead to something looking right to the eye but not on camera, or vice-versa.
Given its age and its intended use, it's not surprising that CRI is a pretty poor indicator of light quality for a modern DP or gaffer. Various alternative systems exist, including GAI (Gamut Area Index) and TLCI (Television Lighting Consistency Index), the latter similar to CRI but introducing a camera into the process rather than relying solely on human observation. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recently invented a system, Spectral Similarity Index (SSI), which involves measuring the source itself with a spectrometer, rather than reflected light. At the time of writing, however, we are still stuck with CRI as the dominant quantitative measure.
So what is the solution? Test, test, test. Take your chosen camera and lens system and shoot some footage with the fixtures in question. For the moment at least, that is the only way to really know what kind of light you're getting.
How to do Scenes on a Moving Train
August 24, 2017 neilosemancamera rigs, cinematography, directing, LED, lighting, poor man's process, VFX, video
Behind the scenes of "Last Passenger"
The publicity machine is ramping up for Kenneth Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express remake, and it's got me thinking about the challenges of a script set largely on a moving train. There are a number of ways of realising such scenes, and today I'm going to look at five movies that demonstrate different techniques. All of these methods are equally applicable to scenes in cars or any other moving vehicle.
1. For Real: "The Darjeeling limited"
Wes Anderson's 2007 film The Darjeeling Limited sees three brothers embarking on a spiritual railway journey across India. Many of the usual Anderson tropes are present and correct – linear tracking shots, comical headgear, Jason Schwartzman – but surprisingly the moving train wasn't done with some kind of cutesy stop-motion. Production designer Mark Friedberg explains:
The big creative decision Wes made was that we were going to shoot this movie on a moving train. And all that does is complicate life. It makes it more expensive, it makes the logistics impossible. It made it incredibly difficult to figure out how many crew, what crew, what gear… but what it did do is it made it real.
Kenneth Branagh has stated that at least some of Murder on the Orient Express was shot on a real moving train too:
They painstakingly built a fully functioning period authentic locomotive and carriages from the Orient Express during the golden, glamorous age of travel. It was a train that moved… All of our actors were passengers on the train down the leafy lanes of Surrey, pretending to be the former Yugoslavia.
2. Poor Man's Process: "The Double"
Director Richard Ayoade
Although best known as The IT Crowd's Moss and the new host of the Crystal Maze, Richard Ayoade is also an accomplished director. His last feature was a darkly beautiful adaptation of Dostoyevsky's classic identity-crisis novella The Double.
Unlike the other movies on this list, The Double only has short sequences on a train, and that's a key point. So named because it's a cheap alternative to rear projection (a.k.a. process photography), Poor Man's Process is a big cheat. In order to hide the lack of motion, you keep the view outside your vehicle's windows blank and featureless – typically a night sky, but a black subway tunnel or a grey daytime sky can also work. Then you create the illusion of motion with dynamic lighting, a shaky camera, and grips rocking the carriage on its suspension. Used judiciously, this technique can be very convincing, but you would never get away with it for a whole movie.
Poor Man's works particularly well in The Double, the black void outside the subway car playing into the oppressive and nightmarish tone of the whole film. In an interview with Pushing Pixels, production designer David Crank explains how the subway carriage set was built out of an old bus. He goes on to describe how the appearance of movement was created:
We put the forks of a forklift under the front of the bus, and shook it… For the effect of moving lights outside the train, it was a combination of some spinning lights on stands, as well as lights on small rolling platforms which tracked back and forth down the outside of the bus.
Part 2 of the Darjeeling Limited featurette above reveals that Poor Man's Process was also used occasionally on that film, when the train was stuck in a siding due to heavy rail traffic. I used Poor Man's myself for night-time train sequences in two no-budget features that I made in the early noughties – see the BTS clip below – and I've also written a couple of blog posts in the past about my use of the same technique on a promotional video and in a fantasy web series.
3. Green screen: "Source Code"
Duncan "Zowie Bowie" Jones followed up his low-budget masterpiece Moon with Hollywood sci-fi thriller Source Code, a sort of mash-up of Quantum Leap and Groundhog Day with a chilling twist. It takes place predominantly on a Chicago-bound commuter train, in reality a set surrounded by green screen. In the featurette above, Jones mentions that shooting on a real moving train was considered, but ultimately rejected in favour of the flexibility of working on stage:
Because we revisit an event multiple times, it was absolutely integral to making it work, and for the audience not to get bored, that we were able to vary the visuals. And in order to do that we had to be able to build platforms outside of the train and be able to really vary the camera angles.
In the DVD commentary, Jones also notes that the background plates were shot in post from a real train "loaded up with cameras".
Director Duncan Jones on the set of "Source Code"
Cinematographer Don Burgess, ASC discusses lighting the fake train in a Panavision article:
It's difficult to make it feel like natural light is coming in and still get the sense of movement on a train… We worked with computer programs where we actually move the light itself, and brighten and dim the lights so it feels as if you are travelling… The lights are never 100% constant.
When I shot The Little Mermaid last year we did some train material against green screen. To make the lighting dynamic, the grips built "branch-a-loris" rigs: windmills of tree branches which they would spin in front of the lamps to create passing shadows.
4. Rear projection: "Last Passenger"
Perhaps the most low-budget film on this list, Last Passenger is a 2013 independent thriller set aboard a runaway train. Director Omid Nooshin and DP Angus Hudson wanted a vintage look, choosing Cooke Xtal anamorphic lenses and a visual effects technique that had long since fallen out of favour: rear projection.
Before the advent of optical – and later digital – compositing, rear projection was commonly used to provide moving backgrounds for scenes in vehicles. The principle is simple: the pre-recorded backgrounds are projected onto a screen like this…
Rear projection in use on "River of no Return" (1954)
Hudson goes into further detail on the technique as used for the Last Passenger:
To capture [the backgrounds] within our limited means, we ended up shooting from a real train using six Canon 5D cameras, rigged in such a way that we got forward, sideways and rear-facing views out of the train at the same time. We captured a huge amount of footage, hours and hours of footage. That allowed us to essentially have 270 degrees of travelling shots, all of which were interlinked.
Because rear projection is an in-camera technique, Nooshin and Hudson were able to have dirt and water droplets on the windows without worrying about creating a compositing nightmare in postproduction. Hudson also notes that the cast loved being able to see the backgrounds and react to them in real time.
5. L.E.D. Panels: "Train to Busan"
Enabling the actors to see the background plates was also a concern for Yeon Sang-ho, director of the hit Korean zombie movie Train to Busan. He felt that green screen would make it "difficult to portray the reality", so he turned to the latest technology: LED screens. This must have made life easier not just for the cast, but for the cinematographer as well.
You see, when you travel by train in the daytime, most of the light inside the carriage comes from outside. Some of it is toplight from the big, flat sky, and some of it is hard light from the sun – both of these can be faked, as we've seen – but a lot of the light is reflected, bouncing off trees, houses, fields and all the other things that are zipping by. This is very difficult to simulate with traditional means, but with big, bright LED screens you get this interactive lighting for free. Because of this, and the lack of postproduction work required, this technique is becoming very popular for car and train scenes throughout the film and TV industry.
This brings us back to Murder on the Orient Express, for which 2,000 LED screens were reportedly employed. In a Digital Spy article, Branagh notes that this simulated motion had an unintended side effect:
It was curious that on the first day we used our gimballed train sets and our LED screens with footage that we'd gone to great trouble to shoot for the various environments – the lowlands and then the Alps, etc… people really did feel quite sick.
I'll leave you with one final point of interest: some of the above films designed custom camera tracks into their train carriage sets. On Last Passenger, for example, the camera hung from a dolly which straddled the overhead luggage racks, while The Darjeeling Limited had an I-beam track designed into the centre of the ceiling. Non-train movies like Speed have used the same technique to capture dolly shots in the confines of a moving vehicle.
"Last Passenger"s luggage rack dolly
Lighting Micro-sets
October 20, 2016 June 16, 2020 neilosemanbounce, breakdown, cinematography, flags, gaffering, gobo, LED, lighting, poly, shaping light, tungsten
From time to time I help out my friend Kate Madison shooting show reels for actors. The fun and the challenge is in creating and lighting little micro-sets to capture angles that look like they might be lifted out of a scene from a much larger production, all with limited equipment.
Here's an interesting shot from a recent showreel for Dana Hajaj. This was intended to resemble a Good Wife style legal drama, though actually the first reference that the lawyer's office setting brought to my mind was Ally McBeal. I remember how they often had hot sunlight coming in through their office windows which would hit the talent from the chest down, while softer, indirect daylight would illuminate the faces.
Clearly this technique wasn't exactly going to work for an MCU, but it did get me thinking about windows as two-in-one sources: a hard source which adds interest and 'sheen' to the image but is too harsh to hit faces with, and a soft sources for faces. Often cinematographers will use two different lights through the same window to achieve these two distinct effects. (I sometimes employ what I call a "Window Wrap" to this end.)
Now, the set for this showreel shot was just a red wall and sconce. (We tried a plant in the corner but couldn't get it to work.) I wanted to suggest what the rest of the set might be, beyond the borders of this MCU, and simulating a window seemed like a natural choice. Furthermore, a window with Venetian blinds would help sell what was really a living room as a place of business. But this was not film noir; I didn't want stripes of light on Dana's face. Instead I used them to add interest to the wall.
Kate had a slatted-top stool in the hall which threw convincing "blinds" shadows when clamped to a C-stand in front of an 800W Arrilite. Ideally the shadows would have been sharper, but without a Dedo or a par this was the best I could do.
To get the maximum richness from the practical, I put a topper (black wrap clipped to the stool!) on the 800 to keep it off the sconce, and placed CTO inside the lampshade to warm up the fluorescent bulb.
To key Dana, I fired a 1K Arrilite into a 4'x4′ polyboard which was positioned next to the stool. Tungsten bounced off poly gives a beautiful soft, matt quality of light, and is a great way to key talent.
The backlight comes from a 1'x1′ LED panel set to about 4500K. What is the motivation for this source? North light coming from another window maybe? The great thing about micro-sets is there's no wide shot so I don't have to worry about that if I don't want to! The motivation is that cold backlight looks good on black hair, and that's that.
As we prepared to roll, I wondered if I should increase the contrast more. I could have done this by (a) flagging the poly bounce to prevent it filling in the "blinds" shadows on the wall and (b) bringing in negative fill on the talent's camera right side to kill the ambience. But I decided that more contrast was not appropriate for this kind of piece.
For another scene for Dana's reel, we mocked up a remote Arabian campsite on Kate's patio! Kate used a piece of fabric hung from a post and two light stands to represent the tent.
I wanted to give the impression that if we cut to a wide shot – which of course we never do, but if we did – that it would show a vast landscape, perhaps a desert, all backlit by moonlight. On this hypothetical production, I would generate that moonlight with 18Ks on condor cranes, gelled with Steel Blue.
But on this tight shot I was able to achieve the same effect with two far smaller sources, both gelled with Steel Blue. (This is a blue with more green in it than CTB. It's prettier and has connotations of many 80s and 90s thrillers and action movies that seemed to use copious amounts of this gel.) In the deep background is an LED panel, 3/4 backlighting a couple of blurry apple trees that could maybe play as vegetation around an oasis. Immediately behind the "tent" is a 40″ C-stand, top floor, with a 1K Arrilite on it. So close to the talent, the 1K comes down at a steep enough angle to imply moonlight, or an 18K on a condor, depending on how you want to look at it.
The flames from the fire pit weren't doing much to light Dana, so I bounced another 1K off a gold reflector on the floor next to the fire. During takes I wiggled the reflector to add dynamics to the light.
To add a final touch of production value, I suggested a foreground practical. Kate found a candle lantern which we hung from a flag arm just in front of camera. Every frame of a Blockbuster movie is packed with details, so things like this help a lot to sell the scale.
The 1K "moon" backlight is at top left. The gold reflector for the fire source is in the bottom centre, with the 1K bouncing into it visible two-thirds of the way down the right-hand edge of this image. The camera is just out of the bottom right corner of this frame. Not pictured is the LED background light, way back off left of this frame.
For more on shooting micro-sets, check out my blog from Above the Clouds, a feature that had several of them. Visit actorsatworkproductions.co.uk for showreel info.
Know Your Lights: LED
September 24, 2016 December 28, 2016 neilosemancinematography, daylight, equipment, gaffering, LED, lighting, tungsten
In this final part of the Know Your Lights series, I'm taking a look at some of the LED fixtures currently available.
In this frame from Ren: The Girl with the Mark, Hunter's face is lit by a small LED reporter light hidden behind the bucket to suggest a reflection off the water.
LEDs (light emitting diodes) generate light through electroluminescence. When a controlled direct current is applied to the electrodes, electrons in the semi-conductor reconfigure, releasing energy as light. LEDs have been around since the early sixties, but for decades they were only capable of emitting a weak red glow, restricting their applications to things like TV standby lights and digital clocks. In recent years the brightness and colour range of LEDs has improved dramatically, making them practical alternatives to traditional light sources.
Compared with those sources – tungsten, HMI and fluorescent – LEDs are more efficient, lighter, generate less heat, have a longer life, and are less likely to break and less dangerous when they do. They are fully dimmable, without the colour temperature changing, but if you wish, some fixtures allow you to alter the colour temperature with the turn of a knob.
On the down side, LED units are expensive, lack the raw power of large HMI or tungsten fixtures, and can often suffer from poor CRI (colour rendering index – see the overview for more info).
The technology is improving rapidly, and LEDs will only get better over the coming years. For now, many regard them as speciality lights, and they are almost always outnumbered by tungsten, HMI and fluorescent units in a drama lighting package. But some productions have really embraced them, an example being Guardians of the Galaxy, where many of the colourful practicals built into the sets were LEDs. Because they can be squeezed into smaller spaces than any other kind of light, and because you can get around the poor CRI by using coloured lamps, or gelling white ones, LEDs are well suited to creating practical glows from computers, control desks and other technology.
These are just a few of the LED fixtures currently on the market…
LP-1×1 Bi-color LitePanel
1'x1′ LitePanels are perhaps the most common LED unit. These panels have two dials on the back: one for brightness, and one for colour temperature (3200-5600K). They can be run off mains or a V-lock battery, drawing 40W to output about as much light as a 200W HMI.
LP-1×1 LitePanel, set up in seconds on a lintel in a street location in Japan for the sci-fi thriller Synced.
I usually ask for a couple of these panels in my package, and they are great for situations like these:
As you are about to roll, you spot an area of the frame that needs a little extra splash of light. It is the work of moments to slap a battery on a LitePanel and fly it into shot.
A light needs to be situated in a tight space in the set, or in a spot which a power cable couldn't reach without appearing in frame, or both. The fact that you can just prop these panels up against the set without worrying about them getting hot and damaging something is huge.
When required to shoot a night exterior without a generator, LED panels can really help you out. Even if you do have a genny, the ability to set up a source without running power to it is extremely useful. A short film I shot called Forever Alone is a good example.
Wrapped in a diffuser like tough-spun or muslin, they make good fill lights or eye lights for day exterior close-ups.
They can make good TV sources, particularly if your set-up time is limited. A spark can twiddle the brightness and colour temp dials during takes to simulate changing images on the TV screen.
There are many manufacturers producing panels in 1'x1′ and other sizes, but LitePanels are the best ones I've encountered. However, I've yet to come across any LED unit with a good enough CRI to use as a key light.
Under the black bag is an LP-1×1 LitePanel to keep some consistency to the light on the actors as the car moves, in this scene from The Gong Fu Connection.
Arri SkyPanel S60-C, the 60cm colour-tuneable model
A range I haven't used is the Arri SkyPanels. Designed primarily to be rigged overhead from studio grids, they come in 30, 60 and 120cm lengths. The coolest thing about these units is that you don't need to gel them; just punch in the Lee or Rosco code of the gel you want to use, and the light instantly changes colour!
Rosco Lite Pads go for a slightly different approach. The LEDs are arranged around the edges of these panels, and bounce off the white backing to produce a soft daylight source. They're not very bright, and again the CRI is not great, but the range of shapes and sizes they come in mean that you can find one to fit most tricky spaces.
Two 3″x12″ Rosco LitePads taped to the dashboard of the picture car in Above the Clouds
I used these a lot on Above the Clouds (check out the blog posts) in many different situations. Two 3″x12″ Lite Pads saw extensive use as fill/eye light, taped to the dashboard of a Fiat 500 in driving scenes. The other standard sizes are 3″x6″, 6″x6″, 6″x12″, 12″x12″ and 3″ circular. The panels themselves are stripped down, so batteries and dimmers can be sited remotely.
Rosco also makes LitePad Vectors, which are more like other brands of LED panel, with on-board dimmers and increased light output, and they can even make custom LitePads.
Arri L7-C LED fresnel
Fresnels
Several companies make small fresnels which at first glance appear to be HMIs, but are in fact LEDs. LitePanels make the Sola 6C and Sola ENG, equivalent to 200 and 100W HMIs respectively. Arri makes the L5, L7 and L10 units, which are each available in three models with differing brightness and colour-tuneability characteristics. The brightest L10 models are comparable with a 2K tungsten fresnel, while drawing a fifth of the power.
There are budget models out there too, such as the NiceFoto CE-1500Ws, which I used a little on Ren: The Girl with the Mark. As with all budget LED and fluorescent lights, the CRI is very poor, but it was useful when we lacked enough traditional fixtures.
Overall, LED fresnels are currently most relevant in scenarios where power is very limited, or portability and lack of heat is particularly important – in a nutshell, electronic news-gathering (ENG).
One of the most exciting things about LEDs is that because the individual diodes are so small, they don't necessarily have to be housed in a fixture of any kind. LiteGear, for example, supplies LiteRibbons, which are strips of LEDs "mounted to a white backing material that is flexible, cuttable and adhesive backed". The possibilities for these ribbons are pretty much endless. Here are some examples:
The Enterprise bridge set featured in the last three Star Trek movies has all its control panels lit by LiteRibbons.
Mad Max: Fury Road, and many other movies with driving scenes, had strips of LEDs mounted to the ceiling, window frames and pillars of the truck cab to increase the exposure inside.
The mini reactor that powers Iron Man's suit is illuminated by LiteRibbon LEDs.
Some predict that, as LEDs get brighter, cheaper and higher in CRI, they will eventually replace every other kind of lighting. For now though, they're just another part of the toolkit in which tungsten and HMIs, and to a lesser extent fluorescents, are the go-to tools.
There is a fifth type of lighting that is emerging too: plasma lighting, but it's so new and so rare at the moment that I don't feel equipped to write a post about it yet. But you can read about it over on Shane Hurlbut's blog.
Another great blog to teach you about the many lights out there is Set Lighting, written by experienced Hollywood gaffer Martijn Veltman. His site was really useful when I was researching this series.
Of course, the most important thing is not what lights you have, but how you use them. There are many, many posts here on neiloseman.com to teach you about that. Check out the Lighting Techniques series for some basics, watch my Lensing Ren video series to see how all four types of lighting are used in practice on a real shoot, or simply search the tag 'lighting' for a wealth of material.
Happy lighting!
Know Your Lamps: Overview
August 28, 2016 December 28, 2016 neilosemancolour temperature, CRI, HMI, Kino Flo, lamps, LED, lighting, tungsten
Welcome to the first in a series of posts looking at the many types of lighting instruments in use on film and TV sets today. This is not intended to be an exhaustive or comprehensive list, but it will give you a good idea of your options, particularly if you're moving up from smaller productions – where lighting kit is mostly borrowed – to larger ones, where you're required to submit a lighting list to a rental house.
Some of the key considerations when choosing a lamp are:
Colour temperature – how orange or blue the light appears – see this post for more info
CRI – Colour Rendering Index – how full a spectrum of light is emitted, and therefore how accurately colours are rendered
Light quality – how hard or soft the light is
Hire cost
Lamps can be divided into categories according to the means by which they produce light. Here is an overview of the main types.
Incandescent (view detailed post)
Incandescent lamps work by passing electrical current through a wire filament which becomes so hot that it glows. In the film industry they are generally referred to as 'tungsten' units after the metal which the filament is made from. Common tungsten lamps include Dedolites, 1K 'babies' and open-face 800W and 2KW units (which have misogynous nicknames I shall not repeat here).
Pros: cheap, dimmable, extremely high CRI
Cons: very inefficient, get very hot, colour temperature changes when dimmed
Colour temperature: 3,200K
Light quality: generally hard (although certain units like Space Lights are softer)
HMI (view detailed post)
The HMI (hydragyrum medium-arc iodide) is the most common form of high intensity discharge lamp used in the industry. It operates by creating an electrical arc between two electrodes which excites a gas. You may occasionally hear about an MSR (medium source rare-earth), which is slightly different technology, but as far as a cinematographer is concerned MSRs and HMIs are the same. They require a ballast to ignite the arc and regulate the current and voltage.
Pros: good CRI, good match for daylight, efficient
Cons: only dimmable down to 50%, expensive, heads and ballasts sometimes hum or 'squeal', older bulbs can vary in colour, flicker issues at certain shutter angles with magnetic ballasts
Light quality: hard
Fluorescent (view detailed post)
Fluorescent lamps are found almost everywhere today, as strip lights in supermarkets and offices, and energy-saver bulbs in the home. Similar in principle to HMIs, electric current causes mercury vapour to emit UV light which is translated into the visible spectrum by the phosphor coating on the tube. Kino Flo pretty much has the monopoly on fluorescent lighting for the film industry. Like HMIs, fluorescents require a ballast.
Pros: reasonable CRI from Kino Flos (appalling CRI from domestic/commercial fixtures), very efficient, get warm but not hot
Cons: limited dimming, high fall-off of light
Colour temperature: 5,500K and 3,200K tubes available
Light quality: soft
LED (view detailed post)
Gradually replacing tungsten as the most common lamps found on no-budget shoots, LED (light emitting diode) units contain semi-conductors that emit light when their electrons reconfigure. The technology is advancing rapidly, but there is currently a wide range of LED lamps on the market, varying greatly in price and corresponding quality.
Pros: extremely efficient, barely get warm, can run off batteries, almost fully dimmable, some models have adjustable colour temperature
Cons: CRI ranges from almost acceptable in the expensive models to downright shocking in the cheaper ones
Colour temperature: varies
Light quality: varies
Though there are other types of lighting, like xenon, metal-halide and HEP (high efficiency plasma), the above four are the main ones you will encounter on film and TV sets today. Over the next few weeks I'll look at each of those types in more detail, listing many of the specific units available in each category and their applications.
By the way, if your budget is too tight to hire film lamps of any kind, you may want to check out my post on lighting without movie lamps.
"Above the Clouds": Week 3
July 9, 2016 September 11, 2017 neilosemanAlexa, Alexa Mini, blog, cinematography, day ext, exterior, LED, lighting, night ext, night shooting, on set, Rosco Litepads
Day 12 / Sunday
A split day, starting with two scenes at two different petrol stations (one of them open!). It's a sunny day and when the cast stand next to the Yellow Peril (the picture car) they are bathed in yellow bounce. We build on this by bouncing more light with the gold side of a Lasolite.
Next we have some interiors in a soup kitchen, which will intercut and contrast with the dining room scenes from day one. Whereas the dining room had perfect three point lighting with a Rembrandt key, I want the soup kitchen to look much less pleasant, so I use toplight, broken keys and cross-light to bring out the texture of the peeling walls.
Our last scene is a night exterior. A sodium vapour security light which we can't turn off is already backlighting the set. Rather than fighting it, we beef it up using the 1.2K gelled with Urban Sodium. This forms half of a cross-backlighting set-up, paired with a 1×1 LED panel gelled with Quarter Plus Green. Another 1×1 gelled with Mustard Yellow provides a pool of light in the background, while the 4×4 Kino gelled wth full CTB supplies a tiny bit of 'moonlight' fill. I've never lit a scene with so many different colours, but it feels realistic because there are so many different kinds of streetlamps and security lights in our towns and cities these days.
Day 13 / Monday
In the pub all day. The scenes are meant to have an evening feel, so we black out the windows with thin weed-blocking material which lets a little light through, and close the curtains. On a tungsten white balance we get just a little blue glow coming through the curtains. The window in the door has no curtains, so we gel it with .9 ND and it looks convincingly dusky outside.
Fairly standard stuff today, lighting wise. Cross-backlighting for bar scenes, a bit of blue glow in the deep background from a kino to give depth and show up the smoke.
We echo the Turner scenes with a symmetrical shot of Andy and Naomi seated in front of the fireplace. For a soft, pleasing key we bounce fire both the Dedos into a poly board. A double CTO-gelled LED panel on the floor enhances the backlight from the fire, and the pub's practicals do the rest.
One of the last close-ups we do has an alcove in the background. It bothers me that the brickwork in there is the same shade and tone as the foreground brickwork – we're losing the dimensionality – so I have Colin run in with a bit of half CTB to cool down the sconce slightly and separate the alcove.
Day 14 / Tuesday
More micro sets in Leon's living room. One of them is a tiny under-the-stairs bathroom, which we light with a single bare bulb hanging down into the shots. Again the Alexa's dynamic range allows me to hold all the highlights and shadows, even when Andy is inches from the bulb, and it looks completely authentic on camera.
For the first time I try gelling the Rosco Litepads to match the tungsten Dedos. It doesn't work; the Litepads are noticeably greener. If I try that again I'll need to spend some time to find the correct cocktail of minus green and CTO gels.
Day 15 / Wednesday
After one final micro set in Leon's living room we move upstairs for some crucial scenes in the master bedroom. I light it with a 2.5K HMI coming in through the window, that being really the only option. I shape this with gels, diffusion and black-out on the window or the lamp-head itself. For example, when we do Naomi's close-ups I stick two or three layers of opal to the middle section of the window. That way we keep the nice hot streaks on the background wall, but Naomi has a much softer light on her.
The only other sources are the two 6×2″ Litepads hidden in the wardrobe behind a key prop, dimmed right down so they just silhouette the prop very, very slightly. For the final bedroom scene I go purely with available light, since the sun is now shining in at a nice angle, hitting the bed and bouncing back up into Naomi's face.
It's our last day in Kent, and many of the crew will be returning home tonight and commuting for the rest of the week, so it feels like the end of an era. Nevertheless, we remain detached and professional. No-one kidnaps Naomi's stuffed dog Rupert and messages a picture of him tied up and gagged with gaffer tape, and definitely no-one retaliates by kidnapping Colin's dashboard Spider-pig.
Day 16 / Thursday
We are at Longcross Studio & Test Track, an ex-MOD facility in Berkshire. We stage a traffic jam on a road originally built for tank trials. The 85mm lens gets more use than it has the whole shoot so far. The compression of perspective works perfectly for the scene, enhancing the feeling that the characters are hemmed in both physically and psychologically.
Most of the action takes place inside the car and is shot raking across the characters from a side window. To get the best shape to the natural light, we black out the sunroof and place negative fill on the window closest to camera, then bounce in extra light through the windscreen.
The rota polar sees extensive use again, although sometimes it reveals weird circular patterns in the car's window glass.
Day 17 / Friday
Our second day at Longcross, and this time we're using the main loop of track. It's non-exclusive, so occasionally a prototype sports car zooms past us, or a stills photographer hanging out of the boot of an SUV.
Day-playing grip Darren has brought his universal mount which we use as a hostess tray, shooting in through the passenger or driver's windows. (Leon is not a fan of bonnet-mounted shots.) The rig prevents us from closing the window, which necessitates minor rewrites, but the shots look great and allow us to cover large swathes of dialogue relatively quickly.
The picture car is towed on an A-frame by Andrew's Landrover. Riding in the Landrover are Leon, Rupert and me, each with a monitor. Leon's shows a clean picture, Rupert's of course has focus assist, and I switch mine between clean and false colours so that I can monitor the exposure as we go around the track. Leon connects his mixer to the Landrover's stereo so that we can all hear the dialogue. Communication back to the picture car is achieved via radio with Max, hiding on the back seat, popping out to slate and even reading in lines for a phone conversation.
Col rigs the two 6×2″ Litepads to the dashboard. They mitigate the sunroof's toplight by filling in the shadows very slightly, but more importantly they put a sparkle in the actors' eyes, which always helps the performances come across on camera. I take a light reading inside the Yellow Peril before each lap, but due to the number of trees around the track, light levels during the takes are about two stops below what I get in the car park when we're prepping. Fortunately the cloud cover is fairly consistent today so there aren't hot patches of sun to contend with.
Today wraps the English portion of principal photography for Above the Clouds, and we sadly say goodbye to Colin, Zoë, Alice and Andrew. It's been a really fun team to work with, and it will be strange next week without them.


text:
package com.ajjpj.cassdriver.connection.api

class CassConsistency(val v: Int) extends AnyVal {

}

object CassConsistency {
  final val ANY          = new CassConsistency(0x00)
  final val ONE          = new CassConsistency(0x01)
  final val TWO          = new CassConsistency(0x02)
  final val THREE        = new CassConsistency(0x03)
  final val QUORUM       = new CassConsistency(0x04)
  final val ALL          = new CassConsistency(0x05)
  final val LOCAL_QUORUM = new CassConsistency(0x06)
  final val EACH_QUORUM  = new CassConsistency(0x07)
  final val SERIAL       = new CassConsistency(0x08)
  final val LOCAL_SERIAL = new CassConsistency(0x09)
  final val LOCAL_ONE    = new CassConsistency(0x0a)
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Without further ado, another new month means another new set of films, so what's coming soon to theaters in September 2017?
Synopsis: A CIA interrogator is lured into a ruse that puts London at risk of a biological attack.
Synopsis: Dolores Huerta bucks 1950s gender conventions by starting the country's first farm worker's union with fellow organizer Cesar Chavez. What starts out as a struggle for racial and labor justice, soon becomes a fight for gender equality within the same union she is eventually forced to leave. As she wrestles with raising 11 children, three marriages, and is nearly beaten to death by a San Francisco tactical police squad, Dolores emerges with a vision that connects her new found feminism with racial and class justice.
Synopsis: The final Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, is tasked with overseeing the transition of British India to independence, but meets with conflict as different sides clash in the face of monumental change.
Synopsis: Raúl, Eduardo and Santiago have led a happy and "straight" life since their childhood, until, one day, Santiago confesses to them that he is gay.
Synopsis: Since the arrival of the new teacher, Maria Drazdechova, to a Bratislava suburban school in the year of 1983, life has turned upside down for students and parents. The teacher's corrupted behavior and one of the students' suicide attempt that could be related to that matter, makes the school Principal call the students' parents for an urgent meeting that will suddenly put the future of all the families at stake. They are asked to sign a petition to move Miss Drazdechova out of the school. The teacher's high connections within the Communist Party makes everyone feel threatened, but at this point they have no choice but to make a decision: will they dare to go against Miss Drazdechova and stand up for what they believe in at any risk, or will they just remain silent and let things be?
Synopsis: Three American tourists follow a mysterious map deep into the jungles of Japan searching for an ancient temple. When spirits entrap them, their adventure quickly becomes a horrific nightmare.
Synopsis: Set in the 1980s, an estranged family hires a cult deprogrammer to take back their teenage son from a murderous cult, but find themselves under siege when the cultists surround their cabin, demanding the boy back.
Synopsis: A group of bullied kids with troubled family lives, band together when a monster, taking the appearance of a clown, begins hunting children.
Synopsis: Life for a single mom in Los Angeles takes an unexpected turn when she allows three young guys to move in with her.
Synopsis: Daniel loved his job as a small town priest more than anything. Then he met Jane. God help him.
Synopsis: Life of three men comes in trouble when their photos appear on advertisement for sterilization.
Synopsis: A group of 5 people find themselves trapped in an elevator in the World Trade Center's North Tower on 9/11. They work together, never giving up hope, to try to escape before the unthinkable happens.
Synopsis: Long careers are drawing to a close for John and Amanda, who teach Latin, English, and guitar at a stately home-turned-school, where they are legends with a mantra: "Reading. 'Rithmetic. Rock 'n' roll!" But leaving is the hardest lesson.
Synopsis: This in-depth look into the powerhouse industries of big-game hunting, breeding and wildlife conservation in the U.S. and Africa unravels the complex consequences of treating animals as commodities.
Synopsis: A woman gets obsessed with the case of a dead woman after learning that the woman had died shortly after having rung her door for help.
Synopsis: Kokone has university exams to prepare for, but instead she dozes off. Even when her father is unceremoniously arrested prior to the Tokyo Olympics and the family is hiding away a mystery or two she finds herself taking refuge in sleep where thrills await her. Could there be more to her dreams?
Synopsis: A couple's relationship is tested when uninvited guests arrive at their home, disrupting their tranquil existence.
Synopsis: A story centered on counterterrorism agent Mitch Rapp.
Synopsis: A father takes his son to tour colleges on the East Coast and meets up with an old friend who makes him feel inferior about his life's choices.
Synopsis: The life of celebrated but reclusive author, J.D. Salinger, who gained worldwide fame with the publication of his novel, The Catcher in the Rye.
Synopsis: A blind woman's relationship with her husband changes when she regains her sight and discovers disturbing details about themselves.
Synopsis: Two high-school couples explore friendship and dating along dissimilar lines, leading to courage and transformation for one teen and a personal crisis for another.
Synopsis: When their headquarters are destroyed and the world is held hostage, the Kingsman's journey leads them to the discovery of an allied spy organization in the US. These two elite secret organizations must band together to defeat a common enemy.
Synopsis: The true story of the 1973 tennis match between World number one Billie Jean King and ex-champ and serial hustler Bobby Riggs.
Synopsis: When a college student unfriends a mysterious girl online, she finds herself fighting a demonic presence that wants to make her lonely by killing her closest friends.
Synopsis: A victim of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 helps the police track down the killers while struggling to recover from devastating trauma.
Synopsis: A woman falls deeper into paranoia after taking a deadly drug.
Synopsis: A young Indian man relocates to 1970s Chicago to become an engineer, but when his job falls through, resorts to an elaborate charade with misfit friends in order to woo his childhood sweetheart.
Synopsis: On the 9th of April 1940, the German war machine arrive in the city of Oslo. The Norwegian King faces a choice that will change his country forever.
Synopsis: "Bobbi Jene" is a love story, portraying the dilemmas and inevitable consequences of ambition. It is a film about a woman's fight for independence, a woman trying to succeed with her own art in the extremely competitive world of dance.
Synopsis: A pilot lands work for the CIA and as a drug runner in the south during the 1980s.
Synopsis: Five medical students, obsessed by what lies beyond the confines of life, embark on a daring experiment: by stopping their hearts for short periods, each triggers a near-death experience - giving them a firsthand account of the afterlife.
Synopsis: Teenagers Zach and Josh have been best friends their whole lives, but when a gruesome accident leads to a cover-up, the secret drives a wedge between them and propels them down a rabbit hole of escalating paranoia and violence.
Synopsis: When tragedy strikes three families, their destiny forces them on a converging path to discover God's love, grace and mercy as the challenges of their fate could also resurrect their beliefs.
Synopsis: The spiritual journey of a ninety-year-old atheist.
Synopsis: This is the remarkable story of an American icon who changed the sport of big wave surfing forever. Transcending the surf genre, this in-depth portrait of a hard-charging athlete explores the fear, courage and ambition that push a man to greatness-and the cost that comes with it.
6. Battle of the Sexes — I almost gave this spot to It, but I don't like horror movies and I think if push came to shove, I'd go with this one because I do have a horror-esque movie on this list already at #5. Battle of the Sexes looks like it's a bit of Oscar bait, but for not being interested at all in the history of this, nor tennis in general, the trailer had me thinking maybe.
5. Flatliners — Admittedly, I'd be more interested in this is if were more of a drama and less of a thriller, but the premise seems really cool and I'm curious how they try to explain the afterlife stuff.
4. American Assassin — I like Dylan O'Brien and Michael Keaton and I had actually written this movie down on my phone after seeing a trailer for it a few months back. This is definitely more of a rent later than a theater watch, but I still think it could be really solid.
3. American Made — Just like the aforementioned movie, this is something I wrote down in my phone at the theater when the trailer came on. I instantly knew it would be something that could be up my alley and I'm glad to see Tom Cruise doing something a little different.
2. The Lego Ninjago Movie — While I don't love the first movie as much as most people, I looooooved The Lego Batman Movie. I have no attachment to this Ninjago thing, nor do I even know what it is, but I'll give it a shot.
1. Kingsman: The Golden Circle — Just take my money already.


text:
One week after surviving primary, Democrat drops out of DuPage County Board race
John Basco
Robert Sanchez
Follow @BsanchDH
A Democratic nominee for DuPage County Board who went public with the possibility that party leaders could ask some candidates to withdraw before the November election has decided to drop out of his race -- but for a different reason.
John Basco said Wednesday he's abandoning his bid for one of two District 3 seats on the county board for personal reasons. His announcement comes a week after he and Hinsdale attorney Julie Renehan were chosen by Democratic voters to be their party's nominees.
"I ran into some hard personal issues I need to address," Basco said. "Unfortunately, I can't give them the focus they need and continue to run."
He stressed his decision had nothing to do with the DuPage Democratic Party's so-called one-candidate strategy.
"This is not a reaction to anyone asking me to step down," the Downers Grove resident said.
Last month, Basco and others said some Democratic county board nominees may be asked to drop out before November so the party can focus its resources on its strongest candidates in districts where it has the best chance of winning seats on the 18-person board that now features 17 Republicans.
One week before the March 20 primary, Basco said he originally agreed to step down if he finished second in the primary, but had changed his mind.
He did wind up finishing second to Renehan in the three-way race for two seats that also included Mehr Qayyum of Burr Ridge.
On Wednesday, Basco said he doesn't want anyone to misinterpret what he's doing.
"I really do feel like if I tell somebody that I'm going to run for office, it's important that I run for office," he said. "I feel bad about stepping down, but things like this have to come first."
To officially drop out, state election officials say, Basco must file a withdrawal of candidacy form.
Once that happens, a committee of Democratic precinct committeemen from county board District 3 will have the authority to select a new nominee, according to Matt Dietrich, spokesman for the Illinois State Board of Elections.
The party has until Aug. 29 to pick a replacement candidate, he said.
Whether that happens remains to be seen.
DuPage Democratic Party Chairman Robert Peickert said he's planning to form a committee next month during the party's county convention that will interview potential candidates.
"I intend to follow our obligations, regardless of how I feel," said Peickert, who supports the one-candidate strategy.
Basco said he's hoping the party replaces him so it has two District 3 candidates to face Republican nominees Greg Hart, an incumbent from Burr Ridge, and Downers Grove Mayor Martin Tully.
In addition, he said he wants Qayyum to be his replacement.
"I would love to see her get on the ballot alongside Julie," Basco said. "I think they could both win."
Qayyum could not immediately be reached for comment.
The two candidates who win in November will serve 4-year terms representing the district that covers all or parts of Bolingbrook, Burr Ridge, Clarendon Hills, Darien, Downers Grove, Hinsdale, Lemont, Naperville, Westmont, Willowbrook and Woodridge.
DuPage County Board
County Elections


APL has announced that it has won the inaugural Green Ship of the Year award at the 2013 International Maritime Awards organised by the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore last week.
The global container line said that the award was given for a 10,700-TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit) container ship built in 2012, the APL Yangshan. The company said that vessel, which is currently plying the Asia-Europe trade, was singled out for its outstanding energy efficiency and performance. The vessel has an Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI) that is 33 per cent better than the International Maritime Organisation's EEDI reference line for this type and size of ship.
APL Yangshan has been built with an electronically-controlled main engine. Such engines are designed to consume less fuel compared to conventional engines for a corresponding load and help lower emissions.
The vessel has also been built with a capacity for cold ironing. This allows it to connect to shore power while at berth in order to reduce emissions. It is also equipped with an advanced ballast water treatment system.
APL said that the APL Yangshan is part of a company-wide fleet renewal programme that aims to build more technologically-advanced and fuel-efficient ships for its global container fleet.


Forex Trading is open for everyone with a will and power. Your next door neighbor might be making some cash on the side trading online, your university professor could be using his mathematical strategies to profit, even your mother can enter forex trading world and succeed tremendously. Along with "good guys" come the scammers – the cyber criminals. The question is how to avoid scam in forex business?
1. Educate yourself about forex trading. It is a never-ending story, so don't think that you can grasp it within a month and than leave it at that. Your knowledge is your weapon, so the more you know the bigger changes you have to make money.
2. Practice as much as you can without giving up. Whether with demo account or with real account you have to put your skills to action. Losing should not be considered as a negative thing. After all, you learn on your mistakes, remember?
3. Avoid scam at all cost.
Today scam is everywhere and the forex scammers use wise physiological maneuvers to attract the newbies. Forex scam can take many forms. My most favorite of all is a promise of wealth with a particular strategy that you, of course, have to buy. Come to think of it, the fancy strategic moves are not that expensive. The price varies, but it is possible to find "an outstanding forex system that will dramatically boost your profits…" for about $100. That doesn't sound so bad, especially compared to all the profits you will get… or not! Let's think for a second. What if this is scam? By the time someone realizes it, thousands of dollars will be made of the lured beginners.
1. Check everything about your forex broker – Review Forex Brokers from top to bottom: read reviews, ask questions, check out terms and conditions on the site, and find out if your forex broker is regulated by an authority.
2. Consider making a small deposit first. Do not rush for a bonus or for major profit. First of all, you will not make profit over night. Forex trading requires a lot of patience and I wouldn't even dare saying that you will make money after 1 month of trading, although according to a monthly poll more than 63% of forex traders think it is possible, but that is another topic and I will not go into details. By depositing a smaller amount you will be able to check whether your funding goes through without any complications. You will also be able to test the quality of support and other services forex broker claims to provide.
3. Withdraw your profits whenever you can as much as you can. Do not leave your money sitting there forever. Some forex brokers offer interests for leaving your money in the account (like in a bank), but it is better to take out your money and check that the withdrawal process doesn't have any flaws! It sound easy – take out your money, when in fact it is much more complicated than you expect. Documents must be filled, phone calls must be made, and your identity must be proven. To make story short, making funds is always easier than claiming your win!
Forex trading is profitable but risky business. The risk is coming not only from forex trading itself, but also from your choices. The fact that you trade online doesn't make it any more secure. Internet can be trap for inexperienced forex traders, so the best you can do is to check everything more than twice before you invest your money. Be responsible for your trading experience.
You don't want to end up hating it just because you fell into the hands of bad guys. It is your responsibility not to invest in unknown, unchecked, not reviewed and not authorized broker. It is also your responsibility not to buy crappy "wonder world forex strategies" that promise to turn you into the richest man alive.
Do not try to catch a fast ride in forex trading – it never works. Patience is the key to your success.


Delaware State Police found a vehicle matching the description of the suspect's vehicle in the parking lot of a Smyrna motel Friday, Feb. 16 and arrested Douglas W. Walker, 39, of Wilmington.
The suspect in a January bank robbery in Wilmington was arrested Friday, Feb. 16 in Smyrna.
Delaware State Police said the robbery happened Saturday, Jan. 20 at about 9:45 a.m., at Wells Fargo Bank, 3215 Old Capital Trail, Wilmington.
The male suspect entered the bank wearing a disguise and demanded money from the tellers. The tellers complied, turning over an undisclosed amount of money to him.
After the robbery, the suspect was seen fleeing in a dark-colored Jeep Grand Cherokee onto Kirkwood Highway.
On Feb. 15, Delaware State Police detectives saw the suspect's vehicle in the parking lot of a motel in Smyrna.
The next day, Feb. 16, the suspect was seen leaving the motel and was stopped by troopers.
The suspect was identified as Douglas W. Walker, 39, of Wilmington.
After obtaining a search warrant for the suspect's vehicle, evidence linking him to the robbery was located inside the vehicle, police said.
Walker was taken to Troop 2 and was charged with two counts of second-degree robbery and two counts of wearing a disguise during the commission of a felony, police said.
He was arraigned at Justice of the Peace Court 2 and was committed to Howard R. Young Correctional Institution in default of $24,000 cash bond while awaiting another court appearance.