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This is a scan of a 4 by 5 inch chrome (positive) done with the Epson 4990 scanner. This is a crop of part of the center of the frame, if you click "original" you will see it at full pixels. The original scan is 11,105 by 8,737 pixels. The scanner of course also handles negatives quite well, and medium format. 35mm film scans are acceptable, but are much better with an inexpensive dedicated film scanner (which won't handle anything larger than 35mm.)

Please excuse the drop off in the top corners and the out of focus stuff, I should have stopped down more. It was one of the first shots I took with my clunky Crown Graphic 4x5 camera.

The vast majority of image editing tutorials out there are written for photoshop. Right now the photoshop community is what is keeping it so popular. Sure they won't actually write plugins, but a larger user base might encourage commercial developers to release a native filter for the gimp.

Either way, I find the GIMP more than adequate for my needs. Pretty much every image in my pbase galleries has been edited with the GIMP.

Hopefully you didn't send him out to a relay box

Walked around the thing at least twice before realizing there wasn't an opening.

As some other comments have already touched upon this listing of the top 10 isn't that useful by itself. Its just a measure of what's 'popular' on one photo site, and nothing more. Perhaps if you could use this list to browse shots taken by those cameras it would be useful... which brings me to http://www.pbase.com/. PBase lets you search by camera model and then view all the photos stored on that site taken by the camera model you have chosen. This is incredibly useful in evaluating the quality of the output of cameras you may be considering.

Additionally if one is looking for a 'better' way to narrow down digital cameras during their research process you would be better served relying on a high quality review site. Here are the two best review sites I know of for digital cameras.
http://www.dpreview.com/
http://www.dcresource.com/

-S

-S

Are you serious? You've never seen a photo of some stars? Well, here you go, lots of them.

http://i.pbase.com/g3/29/633929/2/57488418.Circump olar2small.jpg

Or maybe those are fireflies.

In any case, here's how to reproduce with your own DSLR (this will not work with most consumer digicams).

1. Shoot a shot with clear blue sky, preferably a low-contrast scene (or even just the blue sky itself). Use RAW (will not work with JPEG). It'll look your basic blue (like any sky) in the on-screen review.

2. Open up this raw file in any developer that has high-dynamic range support and tone-mapping.

3. Take the narrow visible color field and map it across the largest possible range/highest possible contrast.

Aside from the fact that the sky will now be a deep, dark blue like a night sky, you will see in this clear blue sky all of the detail that the human eye can't discern. Layers of clouds, a few of the brightest stars, unevenness in atmospheric density, etc.

Develop with blue-leaning white balance and it's a great technique for taking "dramatic nighttime photos" of buildings or objects against the sky, without having to set up a tripod and go out at night.

Robin wrote:
What do you think of these! (.)(.) [writer's note, SFW!]

IluvB00bies wrote:
Damn! You got some cleavage girl!

Raven wrote:
Give me a break, IluvB00bies. Those are so fake.

WoodyWoodpecker27 wrote:
Woody has a Woody Woodpecker! :^ (Bird smily face) Raven wrote:
Yeah, right, Woody. Chicks dig boys with bright red mohawks. WoodyWoodpecker27 wrote:
You're just jellous because Woody look like a rockstar. Raven wrote:
You know too much headbanging can cause brain injury, Woody. And why are you speaking in thrid person? WoodyWoodpecker27 wrote:
Is it too much? OK, I'll stop.

Purple Martin wrote:
I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts...

Raven wrote:
You are such a dork, Martin :^

Snowy Owl wrote:
I LOL'd!

WoodyWoodpecker27 wrote:
Hey Marty, just out of curiousity, what was your air-speed was at the time of the incident?

I have both and was an Opera user for years before switching to firefox. Currently trialing Opera9.

Sure you can turn everything off. That is no biggie. But when I have everything turned on, firefox gives me the edge in space and configurability allowing me to put buttons next to the "File, Edit, etc..." Menu. I recover one line this way and still have all the stuff I want on.

http://i.pbase.com/o4/04/606404/1/63200501.vAlG5XD r.operafox.png

yeah here: http://www.pbase.com/ryusenkai/surfing As for your analogy. i have never shot slide film, but from what i've read, i guess it makes sense. i'm glad we can agree on this. i kind of get tired of people who shoot one way and call the people who shoot the other way stupid.

the chinese internet excutives' point of view is that censorship isn't an issue sinse chinese aren't interested in the censored content anyway. Makes you wonder why there's so much effort put into censoring it in the first place.

The reason is simple - although there will always be people who are aware of censored content at the time it is censored, that cultural memory is fairly short. If the Chinese government can keep unwanted material out of sight long enough then people will stop looking for it.

"Frontline" had an interesting show last week called "The Tank Man", in which they revealed that even in the heart of Beijing today almost nobody under the age of 25 has ever heard of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. In June of 1989 the government/military couldn't hide the fact that they were shooting people in the back as they tried to leave the square (although they did search all the known journalists and confiscated almost all film of the event). The local media put a government-friendly spin on the story and then dropped it completely. There is almost no record of the event available from inside China, and (needless to say) Google blocks all search results that would cover that incident. We in the west can Google for "Tienanmen Square" and get 70,000+ results, with 8 out of 10 on the first page referring to 1989. The Chinese Google returns about 60 results, all of which resemble THIS ONE.

I uploaded two images to this gallery at http://www.pbase.com/gorim/raw_workflow

Basically it shows one of the reasons why one would need to work at 12-16 bits / color channel, with full sized sample images I took and processed.

I am working on a second example, one that shows introduction of artifacts when too many filters/transforms are applied to an 8 bit / color channel image (as one might need to do in reality, as opposed to arbitrary manipulations that could make anything look bad).

This thread has mostly died down, but hopefully people who are interested still manage to take a look and if it helps spur GIMP development, so much the better.

The Bayer pattern is actually just about the most efficient layout for capturing images for human perception. I have done dozens of camparison of images capture using the 6Million Bayer arrayed sensors, versus 10.2 Million layered sensors. In the end they are essentially equivalent. The bayer layout allows you to do more with less by taking into account the human image processing system that is heavily organized to toward luminance/green information.

They are essentially equvilentin terms of detail, at the expense of some color accuracy in the Bayer image.

It's really not a good idea to compare the two formats because depending on the subject at hand, the Foveon chip really is equal to anything from a 3MP to 10MP Bayer chip.

Imagine two scenes - let us start with a flat wall, all one color. In that case the Bayer interpolation will work perfectly, and you will get the full 6MP of information possible. With the Foveon chip you would only get 3MP of data as the layers would not be doing much for you.

Now imagine a second scene, one with a grid exactly the colors of a bayer sensor. if you line up the grid with the CFA, you will get a perfectly black (and perfectly wrong) picture, whereas the Foveon chip will show you the grid as it is.

In the end the mistake you are making is comparing a constant level of image color detail captures with the Foveon to the variable quality of capture you get with a Bayer chip.

Of course real life is always somewhere in-between these two extremes - you in a lot of cases, like leaves against sky or closeups of hair or grass the worst case comes into play for the Bayer chips while the Foveon chip continues to deliver a constant of detail.

It is utter fanboy nonsense to say a bayer 8MP camera turns into a 2MP when taking fall foliage shots. In any real world situation including fall foliage, an 8MP bayer camera like the Canon 350D will capture more detail than the Foveon sensored SD10 NEW 10.2 Million Pixels (3.4 Mp Red + 3.4 MP Green + 3.4 Mp Blue) (description from Sigma USA page).

Well I would love to see an exaple of that assertion, as I have not seen it to be the case in real life images.

For instance, consider my unsharpened picture of distant fall trees in Colorado. View at full size, and see can see even small leaves as quite distinct.

The closest thing I could find to compare it with is this picture taken with a D70, thankfully at full size. Drag my picture into Photoshop, increase the size by 200% and then compare the two with the most distant leavs in the D70 image. The D70 is just not as sharp, and the most distant leaves are rather shapeless for the msot part. The leaves in my picture are actually more distant and smaller, yet they are more distinct.

Other pictures to compare with include some 350D pictures, like this picture of Glacier in the fall. It's not agreat comparison as you cannot see the full sized 350D image, yet even in that picture you can see some detail is just not there and won't be even if you had all the pixels. In fact try to find any full-szie 350D image, it's quite a task as there are so few posted. Or even have a look at this or this or this to see other images that would be good to compare with, if only people posted full size. Each one though starts to look rather "painterly" at some points of the picture.

If you have some good counter-examples I would love to see them.

The sampling issue. The Sigma has no filter to prevent undersampling artifacts. It doesn't suffer from colour moire artifacts, but it has plenty of luminance moire. See here for an ancient comparison of the 6MP Canon D60 and the 10.2MP Sigma SD9:

The Bayer pattern is actually just about the most efficient layout for capturing images for human perception. I have done dozens of camparison of images capture using the 6Million Bayer arrayed sensors, versus 10.2 Million layered sensors. In the end they are essentially equivalent. The bayer layout allows you to do more with less by taking into account the human image processing system that is heavily organized to toward luminance/green information.

They are essentially equvilentin terms of detail, at the expense of some color accuracy in the Bayer image.

It's really not a good idea to compare the two formats because depending on the subject at hand, the Foveon chip really is equal to anything from a 3MP to 10MP Bayer chip.

Imagine two scenes - let us start with a flat wall, all one color. In that case the Bayer interpolation will work perfectly, and you will get the full 6MP of information possible. With the Foveon chip you would only get 3MP of data as the layers would not be doing much for you.

Now imagine a second scene, one with a grid exactly the colors of a bayer sensor. if you line up the grid with the CFA, you will get a perfectly black (and perfectly wrong) picture, whereas the Foveon chip will show you the grid as it is.

In the end the mistake you are making is comparing a constant level of image color detail captures with the Foveon to the variable quality of capture you get with a Bayer chip.

Of course real life is always somewhere in-between these two extremes - you in a lot of cases, like leaves against sky or closeups of hair or grass the worst case comes into play for the Bayer chips while the Foveon chip continues to deliver a constant of detail.

It is utter fanboy nonsense to say a bayer 8MP camera turns into a 2MP when taking fall foliage shots. In any real world situation including fall foliage, an 8MP bayer camera like the Canon 350D will capture more detail than the Foveon sensored SD10 NEW 10.2 Million Pixels (3.4 Mp Red + 3.4 MP Green + 3.4 Mp Blue) (description from Sigma USA page).

Well I would love to see an exaple of that assertion, as I have not seen it to be the case in real life images.

For instance, consider my unsharpened picture of distant fall trees in Colorado. View at full size, and see can see even small leaves as quite distinct.

The closest thing I could find to compare it with is this picture taken with a D70, thankfully at full size. Drag my picture into Photoshop, increase the size by 200% and then compare the two with the most distant leavs in the D70 image. The D70 is just not as sharp, and the most distant leaves are rather shapeless for the msot part. The leaves in my picture are actually more distant and smaller, yet they are more distinct.

Other pictures to compare with include some 350D pictures, like this picture of Glacier in the fall. It's not agreat comparison as you cannot see the full sized 350D image, yet even in that picture you can see some detail is just not there and won't be even if you had all the pixels. In fact try to find any full-szie 350D image, it's quite a task as there are so few posted. Or even have a look at this or this or this to see other images that would be good to compare with, if only people posted full size. Each one though starts to look rather "painterly" at some points of the picture.

If you have some good counter-examples I would love to see them.

The sampling issue. The Sigma has no filter to prevent undersampling artifacts. It doesn't suffer from colour moire artifacts, but it has plenty of luminance moire. See here for an ancient comparison of the 6MP Canon D60 and the 10.2MP Sigma SD9:

The Bayer pattern is actually just about the most efficient layout for capturing images for human perception. I have done dozens of camparison of images capture using the 6Million Bayer arrayed sensors, versus 10.2 Million layered sensors. In the end they are essentially equivalent. The bayer layout allows you to do more with less by taking into account the human image processing system that is heavily organized to toward luminance/green information.

They are essentially equvilentin terms of detail, at the expense of some color accuracy in the Bayer image.

It's really not a good idea to compare the two formats because depending on the subject at hand, the Foveon chip really is equal to anything from a 3MP to 10MP Bayer chip.

Imagine two scenes - let us start with a flat wall, all one color. In that case the Bayer interpolation will work perfectly, and you will get the full 6MP of information possible. With the Foveon chip you would only get 3MP of data as the layers would not be doing much for you.

Now imagine a second scene, one with a grid exactly the colors of a bayer sensor. if you line up the grid with the CFA, you will get a perfectly black (and perfectly wrong) picture, whereas the Foveon chip will show you the grid as it is.

In the end the mistake you are making is comparing a constant level of image color detail captures with the Foveon to the variable quality of capture you get with a Bayer chip.

Of course real life is always somewhere in-between these two extremes - you in a lot of cases, like leaves against sky or closeups of hair or grass the worst case comes into play for the Bayer chips while the Foveon chip continues to deliver a constant of detail.

It is utter fanboy nonsense to say a bayer 8MP camera turns into a 2MP when taking fall foliage shots. In any real world situation including fall foliage, an 8MP bayer camera like the Canon 350D will capture more detail than the Foveon sensored SD10 NEW 10.2 Million Pixels (3.4 Mp Red + 3.4 MP Green + 3.4 Mp Blue) (description from Sigma USA page).

Well I would love to see an exaple of that assertion, as I have not seen it to be the case in real life images.

For instance, consider my unsharpened picture of distant fall trees in Colorado. View at full size, and see can see even small leaves as quite distinct.

The closest thing I could find to compare it with is this picture taken with a D70, thankfully at full size. Drag my picture into Photoshop, increase the size by 200% and then compare the two with the most distant leavs in the D70 image. The D70 is just not as sharp, and the most distant leaves are rather shapeless for the msot part. The leaves in my picture are actually more distant and smaller, yet they are more distinct.

Other pictures to compare with include some 350D pictures, like this picture of Glacier in the fall. It's not agreat comparison as you cannot see the full sized 350D image, yet even in that picture you can see some detail is just not there and won't be even if you had all the pixels. In fact try to find any full-szie 350D image, it's quite a task as there are so few posted. Or even have a look at this or this or this to see other images that would be good to compare with, if only people posted full size. Each one though starts to look rather "painterly" at some points of the picture.

If you have some good counter-examples I would love to see them.

The sampling issue. The Sigma has no filter to prevent undersampling artifacts. It doesn't suffer from colour moire artifacts, but it has plenty of luminance moire. See here for an ancient comparison of the 6MP Canon D60 and the 10.2MP Sigma SD9:

The Bayer pattern is actually just about the most efficient layout for capturing images for human perception. I have done dozens of camparison of images capture using the 6Million Bayer arrayed sensors, versus 10.2 Million layered sensors. In the end they are essentially equivalent. The bayer layout allows you to do more with less by taking into account the human image processing system that is heavily organized to toward luminance/green information.

They are essentially equvilentin terms of detail, at the expense of some color accuracy in the Bayer image.

It's really not a good idea to compare the two formats because depending on the subject at hand, the Foveon chip really is equal to anything from a 3MP to 10MP Bayer chip.

Imagine two scenes - let us start with a flat wall, all one color. In that case the Bayer interpolation will work perfectly, and you will get the full 6MP of information possible. With the Foveon chip you would only get 3MP of data as the layers would not be doing much for you.

Now imagine a second scene, one with a grid exactly the colors of a bayer sensor. if you line up the grid with the CFA, you will get a perfectly black (and perfectly wrong) picture, whereas the Foveon chip will show you the grid as it is.

In the end the mistake you are making is comparing a constant level of image color detail captures with the Foveon to the variable quality of capture you get with a Bayer chip.

Of course real life is always somewhere in-between these two extremes - you in a lot of cases, like leaves against sky or closeups of hair or grass the worst case comes into play for the Bayer chips while the Foveon chip continues to deliver a constant of detail.

It is utter fanboy nonsense to say a bayer 8MP camera turns into a 2MP when taking fall foliage shots. In any real world situation including fall foliage, an 8MP bayer camera like the Canon 350D will capture more detail than the Foveon sensored SD10 NEW 10.2 Million Pixels (3.4 Mp Red + 3.4 MP Green + 3.4 Mp Blue) (description from Sigma USA page).

Well I would love to see an exaple of that assertion, as I have not seen it to be the case in real life images.

For instance, consider my unsharpened picture of distant fall trees in Colorado. View at full size, and see can see even small leaves as quite distinct.

The closest thing I could find to compare it with is this picture taken with a D70, thankfully at full size. Drag my picture into Photoshop, increase the size by 200% and then compare the two with the most distant leavs in the D70 image. The D70 is just not as sharp, and the most distant leaves are rather shapeless for the msot part. The leaves in my picture are actually more distant and smaller, yet they are more distinct.

Other pictures to compare with include some 350D pictures, like this picture of Glacier in the fall. It's not agreat comparison as you cannot see the full sized 350D image, yet even in that picture you can see some detail is just not there and won't be even if you had all the pixels. In fact try to find any full-szie 350D image, it's quite a task as there are so few posted. Or even have a look at this or this or this to see other images that would be good to compare with, if only people posted full size. Each one though starts to look rather "painterly" at some points of the picture.

If you have some good counter-examples I would love to see them.

The sampling issue. The Sigma has no filter to prevent undersampling artifacts. It doesn't suffer from colour moire artifacts, but it has plenty of luminance moire. See here for an ancient comparison of the 6MP Canon D60 and the 10.2MP Sigma SD9:

The Bayer pattern is actually just about the most efficient layout for capturing images for human perception. I have done dozens of camparison of images capture using the 6Million Bayer arrayed sensors, versus 10.2 Million layered sensors. In the end they are essentially equivalent. The bayer layout allows you to do more with less by taking into account the human image processing system that is heavily organized to toward luminance/green information.

They are essentially equvilentin terms of detail, at the expense of some color accuracy in the Bayer image.

It's really not a good idea to compare the two formats because depending on the subject at hand, the Foveon chip really is equal to anything from a 3MP to 10MP Bayer chip.

Imagine two scenes - let us start with a flat wall, all one color. In that case the Bayer interpolation will work perfectly, and you will get the full 6MP of information possible. With the Foveon chip you would only get 3MP of data as the layers would not be doing much for you.

Now imagine a second scene, one with a grid exactly the colors of a bayer sensor. if you line up the grid with the CFA, you will get a perfectly black (and perfectly wrong) picture, whereas the Foveon chip will show you the grid as it is.

In the end the mistake you are making is comparing a constant level of image color detail captures with the Foveon to the variable quality of capture you get with a Bayer chip.

Of course real life is always somewhere in-between these two extremes - you in a lot of cases, like leaves against sky or closeups of hair or grass the worst case comes into play for the Bayer chips while the Foveon chip continues to deliver a constant of detail.

It is utter fanboy nonsense to say a bayer 8MP camera turns into a 2MP when taking fall foliage shots. In any real world situation including fall foliage, an 8MP bayer camera like the Canon 350D will capture more detail than the Foveon sensored SD10 NEW 10.2 Million Pixels (3.4 Mp Red + 3.4 MP Green + 3.4 Mp Blue) (description from Sigma USA page).

Well I would love to see an exaple of that assertion, as I have not seen it to be the case in real life images.

For instance, consider my unsharpened picture of distant fall trees in Colorado. View at full size, and see can see even small leaves as quite distinct.

The closest thing I could find to compare it with is this picture taken with a D70, thankfully at full size. Drag my picture into Photoshop, increase the size by 200% and then compare the two with the most distant leavs in the D70 image. The D70 is just not as sharp, and the most distant leaves are rather shapeless for the msot part. The leaves in my picture are actually more distant and smaller, yet they are more distinct.

Other pictures to compare with include some 350D pictures, like this picture of Glacier in the fall. It's not agreat comparison as you cannot see the full sized 350D image, yet even in that picture you can see some detail is just not there and won't be even if you had all the pixels. In fact try to find any full-szie 350D image, it's quite a task as there are so few posted. Or even have a look at this or this or this to see other images that would be good to compare with, if only people posted full size. Each one though starts to look rather "painterly" at some points of the picture.

If you have some good counter-examples I would love to see them.

The sampling issue. The Sigma has no filter to prevent undersampling artifacts. It doesn't suffer from colour moire artifacts, but it has plenty of luminance moire. See here for an ancient comparison of the 6MP Canon D60 and the 10.2MP Sigma SD9:

The Bayer pattern is actually just about the most efficient layout for capturing images for human perception. I have done dozens of camparison of images capture using the 6Million Bayer arrayed sensors, versus 10.2 Million layered sensors. In the end they are essentially equivalent. The bayer layout allows you to do more with less by taking into account the human image processing system that is heavily organized to toward luminance/green information.

They are essentially equvilentin terms of detail, at the expense of some color accuracy in the Bayer image.

It's really not a good idea to compare the two formats because depending on the subject at hand, the Foveon chip really is equal to anything from a 3MP to 10MP Bayer chip.

Imagine two scenes - let us start with a flat wall, all one color. In that case the Bayer interpolation will work perfectly, and you will get the full 6MP of information possible. With the Foveon chip you would only get 3MP of data as the layers would not be doing much for you.

Now imagine a second scene, one with a grid exactly the colors of a bayer sensor. if you line up the grid with the CFA, you will get a perfectly black (and perfectly wrong) picture, whereas the Foveon chip will show you the grid as it is.

In the end the mistake you are making is comparing a constant level of image color detail captures with the Foveon to the variable quality of capture you get with a Bayer chip.

Of course real life is always somewhere in-between these two extremes - you in a lot of cases, like leaves against sky or closeups of hair or grass the worst case comes into play for the Bayer chips while the Foveon chip continues to deliver a constant of detail.

It is utter fanboy nonsense to say a bayer 8MP camera turns into a 2MP when taking fall foliage shots. In any real world situation including fall foliage, an 8MP bayer camera like the Canon 350D will capture more detail than the Foveon sensored SD10 NEW 10.2 Million Pixels (3.4 Mp Red + 3.4 MP Green + 3.4 Mp Blue) (description from Sigma USA page).

Well I would love to see an exaple of that assertion, as I have not seen it to be the case in real life images.

For instance, consider my unsharpened picture of distant fall trees in Colorado. View at full size, and see can see even small leaves as quite distinct.

The closest thing I could find to compare it with is this picture taken with a D70, thankfully at full size. Drag my picture into Photoshop, increase the size by 200% and then compare the two with the most distant leavs in the D70 image. The D70 is just not as sharp, and the most distant leaves are rather shapeless for the msot part. The leaves in my picture are actually more distant and smaller, yet they are more distinct.

Other pictures to compare with include some 350D pictures, like this picture of Glacier in the fall. It's not agreat comparison as you cannot see the full sized 350D image, yet even in that picture you can see some detail is just not there and won't be even if you had all the pixels. In fact try to find any full-szie 350D image, it's quite a task as there are so few posted. Or even have a look at this or this or this to see other images that would be good to compare with, if only people posted full size. Each one though starts to look rather "painterly" at some points of the picture.

If you have some good counter-examples I would love to see them.

The sampling issue. The Sigma has no filter to prevent undersampling artifacts. It doesn't suffer from colour moire artifacts, but it has plenty of luminance moire. See here for an ancient comparison of the 6MP Canon D60 and the 10.2MP Sigma SD9:

bird that runs and pack hunts on the African plains even now. I'm sure that one of you will know the name of it, as it escapes me at the moment

The Chicken Hawk???

Cream Savers candy are like Life Savers, but with creamy stripes. This picture might clarify things for you.

Actually, "Santa Claus" is a mispronunciation of "Saint Nicholas", who was apparently a real 4th-century person. Let's see ... Yep; there's a web site showing pictures of his church in Cappadocia. See the pictures of him at the bottom. Not quite the modern commercial Santa, but not all that far off.

Of course, his current association with the ancient solstice holiday (Saturnalia to the Romans) has little to do with him. Or with Jesus, for that matter.

The real complaint should be about the ongoing attempts by Christians to corrupt the solstice holiday (with its traditions of evergreen tree worship, lights to counter the dark, and trading gifts) into some sort of Christian religious thing. That's bogus history and theology, as anyone who has read the biblical accounts of his birth will understand. But then, Christians have never been known for their accurate histories.

I was there about two years ago, they had marked trails right up to the main flow (though far away inland from the benches).

I met two guys there who were local Lava Junkies, and visited pretty often - walking in places I thought were a bit unsafe. They were kind enough to show my some of the safer places to walk close to the lava and I got some great pictures as a result.

Read the text from "Close Enough" for a small funny story about them.

My former office was an old Victorian house on a bluff overlooking the waterfront. It was originally built by the mayor of my town, and for twenty years it was the best restaurant in town. The woman who owned my company bought the building, and she had me oversee the extensive renovations to make it into an office. Great work if you can get it. I loved this building. I even got to pick out my own office (naturally, I got a water view - not bad for being the IT geek).

But everyone in town "knew" the house was haunted. I talked to several people who used to work there when it was a restaurant, and one of my friends actually lived in the upstairs part for several months. He told me that one night, he heard a loud crash from the kitchen area downstairs. He started to go down the stairs to investigate, and heard a series of identical smashing noises. When he got to the kitchen, a box of fluorescent bulbs had been opened and smashed all over the place. He said he sometimes heard strange noises and often felt uncomfortable there.

A former waitress told me that several times, she would set down a tray of dishes in one place, turn around, and then when she turned back it would be moved. The former owners told me all kinds of similar ghost stories. Every Halloween the local paper mentions the building as being the most haunted place in town.

One day, a van full of soldiers on leave from a nearby base pulled up. Apparently, they'd seen my office on some TV show about haunted houses, and had come to check it out. I gave 'em the full tour. One woman, as soon as she set foot upstairs, turned around and went outside to wait in the van. Freaked her out, I guess.

Now, geek that I am, I was always the last person to leave the building at night. And very often, I stayed until the wee hours, all alone in the building. And not a damn thing ever happened. No weird sounds, no smashing bulbs, absolutely nothing.

Although I had to admit... I didn't mind going into the scary old basement when I was alone at night, but going upstairs at night used to freak me out something fierce. Dunno why, it was beautiful and well-lit, but damn, it was just creepy. Daytime wasn't so bad, but at night - forget it.

One night, someone forgot to close a back door properly, and the alarm went off late at night. I showed up to deal with the cops. Since a door was open, they insisted on checking out the building. The cop knew the reputation of the building and was a little spooked himself. When we got upstairs he really got nervous - he told me that he just didn't like it up there. He couldn't believe that I'd work in such a spooky place late at night by myself. I'm like, you're a COP. Which of our jobs is more dangerous?

I like to think that we did such a good job restoring the house that the ghosts took off. Or maybe I scared the ghosts off. Who knows. I'm still a little disappointed, though, that nothing ever happened while I was there. I figured if there were strange things going on all the time, I'd set up a bunch of webcams and such... but nope.

Oh yeah, later, I found out that one of the previous owners had passed away in one of the upstairs bedrooms. On the other hand, the first owner died when he fell down the basement steps, and the basement, aside from just being a spooky old basement and crawling with spiders as big as your hand, wasn't nearly as ooky as the upstairs. So go figure.

And did you read the comment about how it will work better than iTunes? That amused me. I couldn't even figure out what was going on with the media play via the winsite images, but how about the control panel/system panel. Here's a comparison:

Windows' Vista Control Panel OS X's System Panel

Which would you prefer to use?

Using the 300D, the only post processing I usually have to do is some sharpening, some color saturation and some noise reduction. The first two are a result of shooting RAW, and the latter is that the Rebel is somewhat noisy at anything above ISO 200 (I usually use ISO 400). From what I understand, the 20D is substantially better in that regard, and that will be my next camera.

Speaking of digital photography, here's a shameless plug for my bird photos.

This is pretty cool... it'd be interesting to have graphs like this for my own home, and might even encourage conservation if I could see how much each thing was using. Too bad it's only of achedemic interest (I'm not about to go and install this, but it's impressive what this guy has done).

One thing I'm kinda puzzled about is the resolution of the graphs. If the hardware has a 3 second resolution, why only take averages at 1 minute fixed intervals? A shifting average (like in this experiment of mine) would make for prettier graphs and I doubt it would take much computation power (and might even reveal details that would otherwise go unnoticed).

I noticed that the graphs shown in the article don't even have a 1 minute resolution; for some reason they are limited to a 4 minute resolution. Seems silly to have such fine measurement resolution and throw it away in the graphs. :-\

Like these pictures??

http://www.pbase.com/kburch/the_picture_from_iraq_ you_wont_see_in_the_news

You can thank the liberal media for not showing these.

Nikon is used by maybe 80% of pro photographers with Cannon at about 15%.

Please point to the Nikon cameras in these pro photographer setups from the Athens Olympics.

Uh huh.

Too true. Take a look at these photos and count the ratio of Canon to Nikon cameras.
Cameras on sidelines at Athens 2004

Hint. The ratio approaches 1...
Looks like Nikon is clueless in several areas these days. I for one am going Canon.

Also note the wireless remotes.

No biggie really. I love my 105 year old house on 2 acres in northern New Jersey. I can't see my neighbors and the silence is exquisite.

Note 1: I said post 1940.

Note 2: I can't see my neighbors and the silence is exquisite. That doesn't sound like suburbia

The suburban life that I have witnessed (growing up in south-central Pennsylvania) was a soul-sucking existence that had many features that didn't make sense. For example, there is the characature of a "porch" and "front door" that all of the suburban houses have, but are functionally useless since the porch is only 18 inches wide and the "porch/front door" complex is centered on a large lawn with no walkway to it. The real entrance is through the kitchen/garage side-door. So why does the "porch/front door" even exist? I suggest that its function is to make a not so nice house LOOK like a nice house, since they aren't even usable.

I currently choose to live in a modest apartment in an old building right at the center of a small town. Yeah, I hear trucks on the street all night, but I also can walk across the street to the grocery store, the hardware store, and the bank. 10 restaurants and bars are with 3 blocks (8min) walk, and I can walk 15min to work. The other benefit is that I see the same people every day on my walks to and from work and the various stores. In the 8 months I've been in my current location I've met (and chatted with) more people in my community than in my previous 25 years combined.

Having a truly rural life would be great too. Some gardening, raise some chickens, do some consulting over the net from home, etc. Its the bastardization of human life that suburbia entails that I have a problem with. I'm not saying that anyone is wrong to want the things that suburbia purports to offer (large house, good schools, relative quiet, two-car garage, etc). Those things are honest, basic desires.

I do however feel sorry for those who have to live in suburbia because of the additional consequences involved with fulfilling those honest desires; reliance on a car to get anywhere, having to cumulatively waste years of one's life sitting in traffic while commuting, having to play "soccer mom/dad" and drive the kids everywhere since they can't walk home from school/practice/etc, having to drive drunk or find a DD instead of just walking/taxi home from the bar, etc, etc, etc.

This doesn't seem that counter-intuitive though...High viscosity liquids have a greater molecular attraction to one another than low viscosity liquids. They would therefore show a resistance to spreading out on the glass. This would give them more solid-like properties and therefore would be more like a ball hitting a wall, where energy is transfered in a rebound. The lower viscosity liquids would not be held tightly together and would therefore spread out easier.

To test this it seems like you could perform the experiment at higher temperatures. The hypothesis would be that the higher temps overcome the molecular interactions and decrease the viscosity.

I just looked at the pictures and am a biochemist so take this analysis, like everything else on /., with a grain of salt. But this seems to make sense to me.

---
Daniel Coughlin's Photographs

Can any photogs out there tell me how Flickr is better than PBase? I've been using PBase for over a year, tried flickr when it first came out and didn't see a reason to switch. Pbase is also a community-oriented site, with nice design, and provides a high degree of control over gallery design and layout to its members (good example: any of the featured galleries on its home page. I log onto flickr and it feels more like a dating site than a photo gallery site. Anyone, anyone?

Can any photogs out there tell me how Flickr is better than PBase? I've been using PBase for over a year, tried flickr when it first came out and didn't see a reason to switch. Pbase is also a community-oriented site, with nice design, and provides a high degree of control over gallery design and layout to its members (good example: any of the featured galleries on its home page. I log onto flickr and it feels more like a dating site than a photo gallery site. Anyone, anyone?

I offer up my list of photo sharing sites. In particular Pbase may not get the buzz of Flickr, but it hosts tens of millions of photos.

I have a friend who uses Flickr but I personally use Pbase.com which I absolutely love and can't believe it wasn't mentioned here. From the standpoint of accessing photos, it can't be beat. $23/year for 200MB of storage space. You upload individual images or Zip files and Pbase makes thumbnails and other smaller sizes, as well as allows you access to the original image. In the last two months they have transitioned to new servers/hosting so the service hasn't been great...but they comp'd those two months for subscribers. They also allow you direct linking to images.

There are some amazing photographers on Pbase as well.

Here's my collection of photos.

I have a friend who uses Flickr but I personally use Pbase.com which I absolutely love and can't believe it wasn't mentioned here. From the standpoint of accessing photos, it can't be beat. $23/year for 200MB of storage space. You upload individual images or Zip files and Pbase makes thumbnails and other smaller sizes, as well as allows you access to the original image. In the last two months they have transitioned to new servers/hosting so the service hasn't been great...but they comp'd those two months for subscribers. They also allow you direct linking to images.

There are some amazing photographers on Pbase as well.

Here's my collection of photos.

I have a friend who uses Flickr but I personally use Pbase.com which I absolutely love and can't believe it wasn't mentioned here. From the standpoint of accessing photos, it can't be beat. $23/year for 200MB of storage space. You upload individual images or Zip files and Pbase makes thumbnails and other smaller sizes, as well as allows you access to the original image. In the last two months they have transitioned to new servers/hosting so the service hasn't been great...but they comp'd those two months for subscribers. They also allow you direct linking to images.

There are some amazing photographers on Pbase as well.

Here's my collection of photos.

I have a friend who uses Flickr but I personally use Pbase.com which I absolutely love and can't believe it wasn't mentioned here. From the standpoint of accessing photos, it can't be beat. $23/year for 200MB of storage space. You upload individual images or Zip files and Pbase makes thumbnails and other smaller sizes, as well as allows you access to the original image. In the last two months they have transitioned to new servers/hosting so the service hasn't been great...but they comp'd those two months for subscribers. They also allow you direct linking to images.

There are some amazing photographers on Pbase as well.

Here's my collection of photos.

I have a friend who uses Flickr but I personally use Pbase.com which I absolutely love and can't believe it wasn't mentioned here. From the standpoint of accessing photos, it can't be beat. $23/year for 200MB of storage space. You upload individual images or Zip files and Pbase makes thumbnails and other smaller sizes, as well as allows you access to the original image. In the last two months they have transitioned to new servers/hosting so the service hasn't been great...but they comp'd those two months for subscribers. They also allow you direct linking to images.

There are some amazing photographers on Pbase as well.

Here's my collection of photos.

I have a friend who uses Flickr but I personally use Pbase.com which I absolutely love and can't believe it wasn't mentioned here. From the standpoint of accessing photos, it can't be beat. $23/year for 200MB of storage space. You upload individual images or Zip files and Pbase makes thumbnails and other smaller sizes, as well as allows you access to the original image. In the last two months they have transitioned to new servers/hosting so the service hasn't been great...but they comp'd those two months for subscribers. They also allow you direct linking to images.

There are some amazing photographers on Pbase as well.

Here's my collection of photos.

I have a friend who uses Flickr but I personally use Pbase.com which I absolutely love and can't believe it wasn't mentioned here. From the standpoint of accessing photos, it can't be beat. $23/year for 200MB of storage space. You upload individual images or Zip files and Pbase makes thumbnails and other smaller sizes, as well as allows you access to the original image. In the last two months they have transitioned to new servers/hosting so the service hasn't been great...but they comp'd those two months for subscribers. They also allow you direct linking to images.

There are some amazing photographers on Pbase as well.

Here's my collection of photos.

This is an issue dear to my heart. As an avid lighthouse photographer (http://www.pbase.com/ldkronos/lighthouses)
I really hate to see these things being abandoned. I think their different styles and architectures are quite interesting. However, some of them are beginning to disappear. Non profit organizations have formed to try to preserve and restore the bigger and more popular ones, but then there are those that have just been left for their own, several of which have collapsed or been torn down and replaced with simple (boring, IMHO) light beacons (for example, this lighthouse:
http://www.uscg.mil/hq/g-cp/history/WEBLIGHTHOUSES /sanduskypierhead.JPG
has been replaced by this:
http://www.us-lighthouses.com/displaypage.php?Ligh tID=138
)

http://www.pbase.com/ukexpat/image/32809264

Just a few years ago the people of Iraq were being starved and gassed to death by an evil dictator. Now in less than three weeks there will be free Iraqi elections for the first time in over 30 years. You can continue to point to the lack of WMD in Iraq and claim the war is unjustified, or you can look at all the good that has come out of the liberation of Iraq - the fact that tens of millions of Iraqis are tasting freedom for the first time.

I know pretty much everyone on slashdot is/was against the war, but ask yourself this - if Clinton was president under the same set of circumstances would you still be anti-war? I don't think so. The irony of the whole situation is that the liberation if Iraq is the most liberal war in American history, yet it is the liberals who are against it. What could be a more liberal cause than removing terrorist dictators from power and bringing freedom to the world?

"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." -- Kennedy at inauguration.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." -- Edmund Burke

http://www.pbase.com/kburch/the_picture_from_iraq_ you_wont_see_in_the_news - if you haven't seen the pics on this page yet then you need to check them out.

It's too late for this dead bastard. But now that Yahoo's policies are known, Johann Bin Laden will surely notify the family before giving away corpses as wedding presents.

Haha...yeah, I completely agree. I won't attribute my photographic growth soley to having a digital SLR but when I look back at my old shots *shudder*, though they were fun. For example:

old

new

'nough said. As long as I'm posting, I have to give a plug for PBase. It's a great site for uploading and sharing photos. I have been a member for three years now and I have gotten great feedback and the list of features just keeps growing. Try them out and enjoy!

~Dan

Haha...yeah, I completely agree. I won't attribute my photographic growth soley to having a digital SLR but when I look back at my old shots *shudder*, though they were fun. For example:

old

new

'nough said. As long as I'm posting, I have to give a plug for PBase. It's a great site for uploading and sharing photos. I have been a member for three years now and I have gotten great feedback and the list of features just keeps growing. Try them out and enjoy!

~Dan

Haha...yeah, I completely agree. I won't attribute my photographic growth soley to having a digital SLR but when I look back at my old shots *shudder*, though they were fun. For example:

old

new

'nough said. As long as I'm posting, I have to give a plug for PBase. It's a great site for uploading and sharing photos. I have been a member for three years now and I have gotten great feedback and the list of features just keeps growing. Try them out and enjoy!

~Dan

I've tried most of the photo services and I can say that PBase is probably the best. One really cool thing about it is being able to search by digital camera. You can find pictures in the 10,000,000+ set by almost any digital camera. This is great when you're buying a new camera and want to get a good idea how it's photos will turn out in a variety of situations. Oh and this part is free.

http://www.pbase.com/cameras

I don't use PBase anymore since I have a lot more photos than most people 7,000+ (after sorting and deleting.) And they're all taken mainly with a Sony Mavica CD400 and weigh in at 1.5MB each. I found a non-nutjob host that offers $6.95 a month service for 1GB of storage and I just pay for my extra storage. Not affiliated (except my site is hosted there) but I use OsGen.

http://www.osgen.net/

• http://www.whcc.com/ -- great color-calibrated lightjet output at great prices if you're comfy with ftp
• http://www.pbase.com/ -- a free/cheap host for albums, allows deep links to images
• http://www.printroom.com/ -- a popular site for albums and print order processing
• http://www.smugmug.com/ -- a popular site for albums and print order processing