camouflage takes centre stage

If you’re anywhere near Brussels, Belgium from October 13th to 15th this year, you could do worse than go to the city’s Royal Military Museum and listen in on the camouflage symposium occurring there.

Although day one doesn’t really count, being more of  meet’n'mingle for camo geeks, the symposium gets going by day two, when several guest speakers, representing a wide range of institutions and disciplines, will give 20-minute talks that  will cover a selection of topics from the origins and history of camouflage, through its evolution  during two World Wars, to modern developments.

Day three continues where day one left off, but also takes a wider look at camouflage from technical,  socio-historical and artistic points of view.

It looks to be a stimulating event for camouflage fans, but even if that’s not your bag (and if it isn’t, why are you reading this?), the venue is guaranteed to be a worthwhile experience for military history buffs too.

hyde definition ltd at iwa 2010

I will be attending this year’s Internationale Waffen Ausstellung (IWA) – an annual trade-show for the shooting, hunting and firearms industry taking place in Nuremberg, Germany, from the 12^th to the 15^th of March 2010.

IWA is the second largest trade-show of its type, after SHOT in the United States.

I will be visiting companies in the outdoor clothing sector to promote Hyde Definition’s innovative PenCott Multi-Environment Camouflage™ and to reveal additional new colour-ways addressing arid, mountain, urban, snow and low-light operational needs.

This show is a fantastic chance to show the industry what we’ve been developing, but I’ve got a lot of leg work to do – the venue is huge and I’m meeting companies from one end to the other across the weekend!

If you would like to meet with me at the show to discuss the exciting opportunities offered by Hyde Definition’s ground-breaking concealment solutions, give me a call on +44 208 123 0302 or +44 7764842047, or email me at dom@hydedefinition.com

9 of the available PenCott colour-ways

help get these tactical chucks made!

Pic courtesy of ITS

Bryan, over at the ITS blog, is making an appeal to all readers with an interest in seeing Converse’s iconic Chuck Taylor All-Star high-top basketball shoes become available in a tacti-cool olive colour. What would make him want to do that? Click on over to his gig and find out!

bizarre bangladeshi bobbies

Who said police work was dull? These are the subtle and understated uniforms of a Bangladeshi police unit, as seen during the country’s recent general election. Maybe there actually is such a thing as the Fashion Police.

Hat tip to Mr E. Larson at the International Camouflage Uniform Society for bringing this to my attention. Don’t know how I could have missed it!

power to the people

Regular readers will remember me mentioning a design brief that my company Hyde Definition fulfilled last summer. It was to reduce the visual impact of a domestic wind turbine erected on private property in the UK, and the client wanted to be able to apply the design himself, in situ. Our website has recently been updated to include photographs of the turbine’s camouflage scheme, kindly supplied by our client.

Realising that it is practically impossibly to conceal an object as large and obvious as a wind turbine against the constantly changing skyscape behind it, we chose to  break up the shape and use different tones that will blend in some, but not all, conditions.

The bespoke design uses two shades of grey, plus white, applied over the black polycarbonate gearbox nacelle and triangular fin in a pixellated quadrilateral symmetry-axis disruption pattern. In plain speak, picture a flat image of the turbine head, with a line running along the centre of the nacelle, and a line running down the middle of the fin. Imagine that lines also extend inward from all the corners and join the central lines near their ends. These are the axes of internal symmetry, which is not a name for the next James Bond film, but is the central mass that needs to be broken up in order to deceive the eye, which we achieved by using square and rectangular serrated shapes in different sizes and orientations.

how accurate is your colour vision?

Test your colour IQ

You will have fun with this neat little game. Simply arrange rows of coloured tiles in order, grading from one hue to another – at the end you submit your result for a score between 0 and 99, where zero is perfect. I got 8, and my eyes are old and bent. Be warned, though – staring at the small squares of colour for a time, under an artificial light source, at the end of a long day that finishes a long week, can physically hurt!

http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?PageID=77

digitally camouflaged phone tower

Having myself just completed a contract to design a pixellated “digital” camo scheme for a privately owned wind turbine, I found this press release by my North American competitor Guy Cramer, of Hyperstealth Biotechnology Corp (I`m guessing he just loves sci-fi!), interesting:

Invisible Towers (See: Invisible Towers).has acquired an exclusive license from HyperStealth to wrap cellular towers within the United States with HyperStealth Camouflage patterns using the HyperStealth “Consealment™” 3M Printed Adhesive Vinyl. In 2007 Invisible Towers won an industry wide award for Innovation after wrapping two towers in 2006 with HyperStealth Consealment Camouflage to meet regulatory and/or community approval.

The four color HyperStealth Cloudcam version used on the Baltimore cellular tower uses White, Tan, Gray and Sky Blue as the only concealment required is for the variable sky conditions.

Cloudcam pattern on a Cellular tower being erected in Baltimore.

Camo`s `R` Us

I`m Dom Hyde, and I run Hyde Definition, a camouflage design and camo clothing business. With this weblog I intend to explore and share the myriad ways that camouflage is a part of our lives.