Nathan Yan

Projects.

These are some things I've worked on, either because a neat idea caught my attention or I had a problem I wanted to solve.

Growing MNIST digits with neural cellular automata

Generating fractals with complex "neural networks" Blog post

GradeBook, an intuitive grade viewer

otp_, a commandline one-time password interface

poly, an 8bit multiplayer platformer (WIP!)

Wells, an illustration of various gradient descent methods

Models.

These are implementations of papers I found especially cool.

Neural Turing Machines [Graves et al.,2014]

Recurrent Models of Visual Attention [Mnih et al.,2014]

Deep Recurrent Attentive Writer [Gregor et al.,2015]

Deep Q Networks [Mnih et al.,2013]

Sketch-RNN [Ha & Eck,2017]

Film Photography.

I think film is such an interesting medium! Hoping to someday incorporate Polaroid and medium format.

Click on a photo to scroll to it, or just scroll left to right if you're on touchpad/mobile.

Preface

These photos are not supposed to be "good" in any traditional sense, or even in any non-traditional sense. They're mostly an experiment for myself to explore older methods of photography, as well as be more hands on (literally!) and cautious about the photos I take.

Roll 3: ???-???, Tri-X 400

This was actually one of the first rolls I ever took, but for some reason never developed until recently.

I think I was mostly messing around with this roll, since I was just testing out the camera at the time, but I still managed to get a few decent photos out of it.

Unknown, Canon A-1 @ 50mm

Seattle Suburb (+ birbs!), Canon A-1 @ 50mm

My car, Canon A-1 @ 50mm

Roll 2: Feb 2021 - Mar 2021, Portra 400

This roll was actually taken before Roll 1, but was developed later. I've decided just now to order the rolls by their development date.

This was a fun roll because we had a few snow days this year and I was able to capture some of those moments with the film camera. In addition, this roll features a lot of varied photos from around the Seattle/Bellevue area.

These photos don't have the best scan quality. I'll probably come back in a few days and rescan them.

Seattle Center, Canon A-1 @ 50mm

Space Needle, Canon A-1 @ 50mm

Pacific Science Center, Canon A-1 @ 50mm

Alweg Monorail, Canon A-1 @ 50mm

Meadow Wood Park (self-timer, I'm a bit blurry), Canon A-1 @ 50mm

Meadow Wood Park, Canon A-1 @ 50mm

Roll 1: Mar - Jul 2021, Portra 400

I was really excited to use color film, and it was a ton of fun seeing the photos after they were developed.

I also didn't self-develop this roll, because I was worried about messing up the chemistry since color film is generally trickier to get right.

In fact, I was so worried about ruining the film that I scanned them with the protective cover still on (shoutout to Omega Photo in Bellevue!), and you can see the lip of the cover on the photos! I thought it gave them a more personal, sentimental look to it so I decided not to edit them out.