about

Me

I'm Karl Martin, a twenty-something year old Ph.D. student attending the University of Toronto. I am an electrical engineer (in theory, at least), and my research is in the area of image and video coding and security. Visit my academic website for more information on my research activities. For those interested, I attended Earl Haig Secondary School (academic gifted program and Claude Watson School for the Arts music major in clarinet), and the University of Toronto (Bachelor of Applied Science in Engineering Science – Electrical Option, and Master of Applied Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering).

I was born in Singapore, but I have lived in Toronto since before my first birthday. I love Toronto for its life and diversity (also, pretty much all my friends and family are here) and have no plans to leave. However, if I choose to stay in the academic world, I may be taken to other interesting places.

As should be obvious from this website, my main hobby is photography. Whether it be going out on a photo-shoot, or processing some shots on my computer, much of my spare time is spent on photography related activities.

Music is also an important part of my life. Attending the Claude Watson School for the Arts as a clarinet major during high school gave me the opportunity to perform with some exceptional musicians in orchestras, bands and small ensembles. During this time I also played the alto sax and the bassoon (AKA the farting bedpost). Before finishing high school, I achieved grade 10 level clarinet performance at the Royal Conservatory of Music. I consider these my golden years; since then, university has sucked the living soul out of me (just kidding...sort of). These days, my involvement in music is mainly limited to listening to recordings (constantly) and attending performances (as often as possible) of mostly classical and jazz music. My favourite composer is Dvořák, with Mozart coming in a close second, and my favourite jazz musician is Dave Brubeck.

ethervizion.com

This site was born in late 1999. I started it as a place to display my 3D art, and it slowly morphed into a photography site as that became my main hobby. It is currently in its third design version, with layout and presentation done completely using CSS2.1 (so please, use Firefox, Mozilla, or at least IE6 if you are on a Windows PC; I haven't a clue what this site looks like on a Mac, or any other platform). The backend has been coded entirely from scratch using PHP and MySQL so that it works exactly the way I want it to.

What does "ethervizion" mean, you ask? Not much, really. It is simply what I came up with when racking my brain for a domain name (I shall eventually invent a better story). That's it.

This site uses Trebuchet MS as the primary font. That makes it look nice. If you do not have that font, you will likely see Arial, which is less nice. You can download Trebuchet MS here (for Windows). I doubt I'm supposed to make it available here, so shhhh, don't tell anyone.

Photography

I photograph anything that I think will make an aesthetically pleasing photo. That's pretty much it. I do specifically enjoy night photography, which unfortunately requires me to carry around a tripod. You may notice a lack of photos containing human beings. I am not averse to such photography, but at this point it is not something I'm ready to master. To see some of my photos which may not be displayed on this site, check out my flickr page.

I was shooting 35mm film with a Nikon F80 SLR camera up until August 2006. Since then, I've been using a Nikon D200 digital SLR. The following is a relatively complete list of my relevant equipment:

3D Art

I started messing around with 3D art in 1997 using POV-Ray. But after a while, its text-based approach got a little annoying, so I used Moray as a modelling interface for POV-Ray, and things got a little more interesting. It was around this time that I took notice of Vue d'Esprit, a nice little piece of software used for rendering realistic natural environments. It was previously shareware, but version 2, now a real commercial product, had been recently released. I have stuck with this software ever since, and it has now grown to be a major force in the industry. In 1999 I created the Vue d'Esprit Users Webring, and it is still running today. I've also added Rhino to my toolbox, a great NURBS-based modeller.

Unfortunately, it's been a few years since I've been active working on 3D art. However, I keep some of my old work up, and perhaps some day I will pick it up again.

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