A cropped section of a wide-angle shot is EXACTLY the same compositionally as using a telephoto lens. (But of course it will be lower quality.)
Not true. At the same settings (shutter speed/aperture/ISO), if you have a crop of a wide angle shot you'll have a lot more depth of field than if you were to zoom in on that cropped piece of the scene with a zoom lens to fill the frame. This is one of the reasons people use a longer lens for portraits since longer lenses do a better job of throwing the background out of focus.
I don't like this kind of thinking since it invalidates much of what makes a good picture. As a teacher of mine said, cropping should be done IN camera.
When you shoot a scene with a wider focal length, objects look different in relation to each other because of the distortion of the lens whereas zooming in can pull distant objects in tighter and provide a less distorted look. The hardest thing is to go from that digital snapshot mentality of "let me just take a few wide angle shots and worry about it later" to a more thoughtful approach where you consider each and every part of a scene and decide if it's valuable to include. Like another teacher of mine said, "You're responsible for everything in the frame."
For me, good photography is about light and emotion, get those two things right, and a lot of the other stuff falls into place.
A good review is at dpreview.com (skip to conclusion if you're in a hurry).
This technology still has a way to go, but the SD9 certainly is an interesting camera.
One huge problem is with adaptation - Sigma makes consumer-grade lenses and cameras, some of which are of poor quality (but quite affordable). For these cameras to be adapted by professionals, Sigma need to create a camera with Canon or Nikon mounts, but furthermore, they need to erase the stigma attached to their equipment by many professional photographers.
If they were to make a full-frame sensor in a Canon mount that worked better at higher ISOs, this camera would be a huge seller.
As far as I know, the NEC Powermate Eco is the only computer that has been built with the foresight to have recyclable parts.
A look at just how bad things have gotten (re: computer salvaging) can be found here.
Interesting, I've found the exact opposite to be true. I'm going to first assume you're talking about slide film, which has a dynamic range of about four stops, since that's what most people are shooting professionally (save for photojournalists and wedding photographers).
I've found that the shadow detail in digital cameras (specifically the canon d60) can be absolutely stunning- through some Levels adjustment I've been able to take parts of a digital image that appear completely black, and get excellent detail out of them, something I'd never be able to do shooting on transparencies.
I'd recommend a look at Michael Reichmann's site, where he reviews the D60 vs. 35mm vs. Medium Format and concludes that for up to 11x17 prints, the Canon D60 is at least as good as 35mm. Furthermore, I've personally found that the raw images delivered by my D60 look better on screen and in print than scanned in images, since the pixel quality simply seems better (despite using a top of the line film scanner that's optimally configured).
In closing, as a professional photographer, I've never had a client need anything more resolution than what I've been able to deliver digitally.
To appreciate what the Z-Boys were doing, it's helpful to realize that they were trying to make tricks that had never before been landed. From simply kick-turning at the top of a pool, to Tony Alva's very first f/s air, this stuff was all new, and no one had ever done any of it before.
It also seems like this would just have been another group of kids skating who didn't go anywhere if it wasn't for Craig Stecyk. By documenting them and writing lifestyle articles for Skateboarder Magazine, Stecyk pushed the mystique of Dogtown, and put these kids in front of the world.
Anyways, what Katz said is true, it is really sad to see where some of these guys ended up. Jay Adams just recently got out of prison, and is working at a skate shop. Stacy Peralta went on to build the legendary Bones Brigade team, and Tony Alva continues to seek out pools and drainage ditches to skate.
If you're interested in starting your own, there's a number of web apps that might help you, including Pitas and Blogger.
I keep my web log as a way of recording what's going on with me for friends, parents, and myself. Sure, it's not particularly in-depth or personal, but looking back on it helps me place when events happened, and is a nice little digital record for me to look back on.
As an elective (I'm a CS major), I enrolled in an anthropology course entitled Sustainable Development. When I arrived to class with a friend of mine, I saw that there was only one other person in the class, making it the smallest class I'd ever taken.
When our professor arrived, Prof. Teleki, he immediately launched into questions about why we were here, what we wanted to learn, and our thoughts on the current state of the environment. His intention was to find out what we thought in order to model a course around us, something I'd never had done before. He immediately dismissed the course title as an attempt to put two words together that should never ever go together, just to see if the university would accept it.
In the coming weeks we learned of his working with Jane Goodall, his attempts to establish a national park in Sierra Leone, and his work with (and against) the US government to prohibit illegal animals coming into our country that drug companies pay top dollar for. He forced me to refocus my common beliefs about how land should be handled with his opinion that national parks aren't places to be visited by tourists but places that should be entirely shut off from human intervention with no one allowed to enter them at any time. His interactions with the World Bank in the 1980's led him to believe that they are responsible for a large amount of the environmental destruction happening around the world. When I did my final project with him, I ended up meeting a World Bank employee in charge of a particular country who fully admitted that this was true, and that little was being done (or would be done in the future) to prevent the exploitation of people and resources.
We would leave class either incredibly inspired, or downtrodden, depending on that day's discussion. He made me think of my future not as a time to find a job and settle down, but as an opportunity to do something truly different with my life, to use my gained knowledge in computers to affect people positively, rather than just settle down in some button-pushing tech job.
The class ended almost a year ago, and I continue to keep in touch with him, going over his house for dinner, playing with his kid, and leading him through buying his first computer (he doesn't even have an answering machine). When my college education is finally over (this june), I will leave with my BA in Computer Science from the engineering school, and a firm desire to change the world from Professor Teleki.
Very few women seem to have joined the Nader campaign.
As someone who has recently started working for the Nader campaign, I can say unequivocally that he is wrong. The Nader Campaign HQ is an almost perfect 50-50 split between the sexes. Furthermore, donations (which I enter into the database, yes, data entry, yes, I'm interested in helping any way I can), are divided similarly evenly between male and female.
Spam Cop lets you paste your headers and text into a text window, automatically processes the headers, and gives you the option to send notification of the spamming to where it originated from. It's an easy way to fight spam, and I've personally helped get a couple of spam accounts killed with it.
(note: This is paraphrased from someone elses comments, who gave permission for them to be used).
How NetPD found these people to add to their ban list is an interesting issue. Were they offering Metallica mp3s themselves and tracking the people who downloaded them? If so, did they have permission from Metallica to do this?
Or, were they tracking people who were offering Metallica mp3s? It wouldn't be difficult to take any 3 meg file (like one of those that photoshop creates), rename it Metallica - Ride the Lightning.mp3, and offer it. The issue is about copyrighted material being freely traded, not the use of their name, so would NetPD be downloading Metallica mp3s from all the people offering them, playing them to verify that it is indeed Metallica, and then adding these people to the list? If so, did they get permission to do this?
If I had the time, I'd download some girl pop songs and rename them to Metallica songs
What's the worst thing a virus could do to a computer? I know viruses exist that were able to burn out old monitors by playing around with their refresh rate. But, today, is there any physical damage to any part of the computer that can be caused by a virus?
Vinyl is still an affordable medium for independent bands to put out music on. If you take a look at any of the larger independent labels in existence (like Dischord, Alternative Tentacles, Victory or Matador) you can see that they still produce a tremendous number of vinyl records.
This is done for a few reasons:
It's a less substantial investment than CDs (if the band just doesn't sell, it's less money lost by the label than if they gone ahead and released a full-length CD with them).
Consumers are more willing to spend $3 on a seven inch record of a band they've never heard of than $12 for a full-length CD.
A seven inch with four songs by a band just starting out will most likely have four of their better songs, whereas they might have to struggle to produce an entire CD of music, and write a lot of crappy songs.
Flaming, like skateboarding, seems overwhelmingly an adolescent form of recreation.
People of all ages skateboard, Jon.
Skateboarding is a brilliant show of redefining urban space, and seeing the world through a decidedly different filter. On a day to day basis, we create a radical subversion of the intended use of the city and its structures. By doing so, we threaten accepted definitions of space, taking it over conceptually and physically, and striking at the heart of what everyone else understands by the city.
Slashdot Mirror
A cropped section of a wide-angle shot is EXACTLY the same compositionally as using a telephoto lens. (But of course it will be lower quality.)
Not true. At the same settings (shutter speed/aperture/ISO), if you have a crop of a wide angle shot you'll have a lot more depth of field than if you were to zoom in on that cropped piece of the scene with a zoom lens to fill the frame. This is one of the reasons people use a longer lens for portraits since longer lenses do a better job of throwing the background out of focus.
I don't like this kind of thinking since it invalidates much of what makes a good picture. As a teacher of mine said, cropping should be done IN camera.
When you shoot a scene with a wider focal length, objects look different in relation to each other because of the distortion of the lens whereas zooming in can pull distant objects in tighter and provide a less distorted look. The hardest thing is to go from that digital snapshot mentality of "let me just take a few wide angle shots and worry about it later" to a more thoughtful approach where you consider each and every part of a scene and decide if it's valuable to include. Like another teacher of mine said, "You're responsible for everything in the frame."
For me, good photography is about light and emotion, get those two things right, and a lot of the other stuff falls into place.
A couple (admittedly biased) links: Some articles I wrote about digital photography, and a course I teach.
For (photojournalistic) inspiration, I look here and here (warning, popup).
StephenOracle Hosting
A good review is at dpreview.com (skip to conclusion if you're in a hurry).
This technology still has a way to go, but the SD9 certainly is an interesting camera.
One huge problem is with adaptation - Sigma makes consumer-grade lenses and cameras, some of which are of poor quality (but quite affordable). For these cameras to be adapted by professionals, Sigma need to create a camera with Canon or Nikon mounts, but furthermore, they need to erase the stigma attached to their equipment by many professional photographers.
If they were to make a full-frame sensor in a Canon mount that worked better at higher ISOs, this camera would be a huge seller.
As far as I know, the NEC Powermate Eco is the only computer that has been built with the foresight to have recyclable parts. A look at just how bad things have gotten (re: computer salvaging) can be found here.
I agree with much of the article - search engines rankings are best when they are largely based on factors out of the webmaster's control.
---
Travel Photography
Interesting, I've found the exact opposite to be true. I'm going to first assume you're talking about slide film, which has a dynamic range of about four stops, since that's what most people are shooting professionally (save for photojournalists and wedding photographers).
I've found that the shadow detail in digital cameras (specifically the canon d60) can be absolutely stunning- through some Levels adjustment I've been able to take parts of a digital image that appear completely black, and get excellent detail out of them, something I'd never be able to do shooting on transparencies.
I'd recommend a look at Michael Reichmann's site, where he reviews the D60 vs. 35mm vs. Medium Format and concludes that for up to 11x17 prints, the Canon D60 is at least as good as 35mm. Furthermore, I've personally found that the raw images delivered by my D60 look better on screen and in print than scanned in images, since the pixel quality simply seems better (despite using a top of the line film scanner that's optimally configured).
In closing, as a professional photographer, I've never had a client need anything more resolution than what I've been able to deliver digitally.
To appreciate what the Z-Boys were doing, it's helpful to realize that they were trying to make tricks that had never before been landed. From simply kick-turning at the top of a pool, to Tony Alva's very first f/s air, this stuff was all new, and no one had ever done any of it before.
It also seems like this would just have been another group of kids skating who didn't go anywhere if it wasn't for Craig Stecyk. By documenting them and writing lifestyle articles for Skateboarder Magazine, Stecyk pushed the mystique of Dogtown, and put these kids in front of the world.
Anyways, what Katz said is true, it is really sad to see where some of these guys ended up. Jay Adams just recently got out of prison, and is working at a skate shop. Stacy Peralta went on to build the legendary Bones Brigade team, and Tony Alva continues to seek out pools and drainage ditches to skate.
As a non-fan of Mr. Lomborg, I'd like to offer up a few links:
Anti-Lomborg - Responses to Bjorn's environmental writing
Debunking Pseudo-Scholarship: Things a journalist should know about The Skeptical Environmentalist
Union of Concerned Scientists examine The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjørn Lomborg
Michael Reichmann is a professional landscape photographer from the Great White North.
Well, here you go, (Alan Cox's daily journal).
A nice history lesson on weblogs.
If you're interested in starting your own, there's a number of web apps that might help you, including Pitas and Blogger.
I keep my web log as a way of recording what's going on with me for friends, parents, and myself. Sure, it's not particularly in-depth or personal, but looking back on it helps me place when events happened, and is a nice little digital record for me to look back on.
First, Is Google Up To the Task?, and secondly, What Harm Has Google Already Caused?".
at http://groups.google.com/, it looks to be nicely integrated into the google search template.
When our professor arrived, Prof. Teleki, he immediately launched into questions about why we were here, what we wanted to learn, and our thoughts on the current state of the environment. His intention was to find out what we thought in order to model a course around us, something I'd never had done before. He immediately dismissed the course title as an attempt to put two words together that should never ever go together, just to see if the university would accept it.
In the coming weeks we learned of his working with Jane Goodall, his attempts to establish a national park in Sierra Leone, and his work with (and against) the US government to prohibit illegal animals coming into our country that drug companies pay top dollar for. He forced me to refocus my common beliefs about how land should be handled with his opinion that national parks aren't places to be visited by tourists but places that should be entirely shut off from human intervention with no one allowed to enter them at any time. His interactions with the World Bank in the 1980's led him to believe that they are responsible for a large amount of the environmental destruction happening around the world. When I did my final project with him, I ended up meeting a World Bank employee in charge of a particular country who fully admitted that this was true, and that little was being done (or would be done in the future) to prevent the exploitation of people and resources.
We would leave class either incredibly inspired, or downtrodden, depending on that day's discussion. He made me think of my future not as a time to find a job and settle down, but as an opportunity to do something truly different with my life, to use my gained knowledge in computers to affect people positively, rather than just settle down in some button-pushing tech job.
The class ended almost a year ago, and I continue to keep in touch with him, going over his house for dinner, playing with his kid, and leading him through buying his first computer (he doesn't even have an answering machine). When my college education is finally over (this june), I will leave with my BA in Computer Science from the engineering school, and a firm desire to change the world from Professor Teleki.
As someone who has recently started working for the Nader campaign, I can say unequivocally that he is wrong. The Nader Campaign HQ is an almost perfect 50-50 split between the sexes. Furthermore, donations (which I enter into the database, yes, data entry, yes, I'm interested in helping any way I can), are divided similarly evenly between male and female.
Bibliofind is similar to Abe's, and comes up with numerous instances of this book for as low as $25.00.
Spam Cop lets you paste your headers and text into a text window, automatically processes the headers, and gives you the option to send notification of the spamming to where it originated from. It's an easy way to fight spam, and I've personally helped get a couple of spam accounts killed with it.
(note: This is paraphrased from someone elses comments, who gave permission for them to be used).
How NetPD found these people to add to their ban list is an interesting issue. Were they offering Metallica mp3s themselves and tracking the people who downloaded them? If so, did they have permission from Metallica to do this?
Or, were they tracking people who were offering Metallica mp3s? It wouldn't be difficult to take any 3 meg file (like one of those that photoshop creates), rename it Metallica - Ride the Lightning.mp3, and offer it. The issue is about copyrighted material being freely traded, not the use of their name, so would NetPD be downloading Metallica mp3s from all the people offering them, playing them to verify that it is indeed Metallica, and then adding these people to the list? If so, did they get permission to do this?
If I had the time, I'd download some girl pop songs and rename them to Metallica songs
-Steve WDC
Besides being an inane comment, it's been shown that this clearly isn't the solution. Declan wrote about this:
http://www.wired.com/news/p olitics/0,1283,35368,00.html
Steve
What's the worst thing a virus could do to a computer? I know viruses exist that were able to burn out old monitors by playing around with their refresh rate. But, today, is there any physical damage to any part of the computer that can be caused by a virus?
Vinyl is still an affordable medium for independent bands to put out music on. If you take a look at any of the larger independent labels in existence (like Dischord, Alternative Tentacles, Victory or Matador) you can see that they still produce a tremendous number of vinyl records.
This is done for a few reasons:
It's a less substantial investment than CDs (if the band just doesn't sell, it's less money lost by the label than if they gone ahead and released a full-length CD with them).
Consumers are more willing to spend $3 on a seven inch record of a band they've never heard of than $12 for a full-length CD.
A seven inch with four songs by a band just starting out will most likely have four of their better songs, whereas they might have to struggle to produce an entire CD of music, and write a lot of crappy songs.
and of course:
Damn it, they just sound better.
SteveBefore we know it, they'll propose taxing e-mail! (just a tribute to the online hoax that makes my blood boil like no other)
I'm imagining my geek factor will go way down by saying this, but did anyone read this as referring to earth's nearest star?
Somehow I wouldn't put MS's PR people past a claim like this.
People of all ages skateboard, Jon.
Skateboarding is a brilliant show of redefining urban space, and seeing the world through a decidedly different filter. On a day to day basis, we create a radical subversion of the intended use of the city and its structures. By doing so, we threaten accepted definitions of space, taking it over conceptually and physically, and striking at the heart of what everyone else understands by the city.