My wife is a professional photographer and consultant, I sometimes use her equipment to take some shots. But I can give you some hints based on what I know:
You will need a DSLR camera. Sometimes you can take good shots with a compact camera, sometimes you can't. Professional-looking equipment is also part of the show, so people will bother you less if you look like a professional.
You usually won't be able to make good close-ups from far away without a tripod (and you probably won't get inside with a tripod), so you'll need to be close to the stage. Work with your camera in manual mode or speed priority, use a lens with a good aperture (be aware that below f/1.8 many not-so outrageusly expensive lenses may suffer from severe chromatic aberrations), use a sensible ISO value for the lens aperture and the kind of venue, and be aware that you probably won't take good pictures using the camera on your hands with speeds below 1/20s. If many variables confuse you, you may try a fixed aperture lens - you can probably find something like f1.8/50mm cheap, that will allow you to do good close-ups. As I said, I've used a common 18-55mm/3.5-5.6 with good results, but with a f/1.8 lens you'll be able to take dark photos and capture all the essence of the moment.
Some (good) photographers use speelites (those flashes you put on top of your camera) for floodfilling. You point your flash to the ceiling, and on a minimal setting, so it will "light up" the scene or the background without causing too much damage. Many use filters to scatter the flashlight and/or a small reflector to minimize impact on the public. Some (bad) photographers just think they need it, and spend all the time they have ruining other people's photos with light contamination. One final note regarding equipment - live concerts are terrible for cameras, be aware that you may have to send your machine and lenses to be cleaned every year or so. The cigarrete smoke and from special effects machines will slowly make your machine dirty.
Now the good stuff - how to get in & get away with it: Get a professional-looking DSLR! If it is a local venue, you can contact the organization previously and ask for permission to take pictures, They usually allow it if you give them a copy of the resulting pictures. Many times you can score a free ticket if you already have portfolio. If the organization doesn't respond you, sometimes contacting the band directly works, but don't expect a free ticket. If nothing works, park near the venue and try to go in with the camera, they probably won't stop you if you look like a "photographer".
With smaller bands, they won't care if your photographing or not, specially if not using a flash at all. In bigger venues, expect to have a limited time to take pictures (usually the 2 first songs). I've actually seen concerts where the band stopped the concert until everyone stopped flashing their eyes.
Authorization from the organizers usually will allow you to go to the "special zone" between the stage and the public, but not much more. Every other situation may or may not give you access to that, so ask politely to whoever is doing security there.
Don't take my experience as a gospel (I'm from an european country, it may be different where you live), specially because my experience is mainly extreme metal concerts. Last advice - the mosh pit isn't the place to carry expensive equipment, so be careful if you cross it.
And it's not obvious how would it work with fill lighting (where you use the flash as a secundary scene light source), or multiple hi-speed sequence shots with a professional speedlite.
It won't work that way. Assuming the device is made as any other professional flash, the speed of the operation will be too fast and the bightness spike duration will be too short to have a cascading effect. I've worked with professional studio flashes, and this behavior don't happen.
I've done concert photography with an f/3.5 lens and 1600 ISO without much issue. Many modern compact cameras also shoot in the infrared range, so you can actually see people without any visible light. Sony even advertised this feature in some models.
My point is showing that just throwing "more government" to the problem isn't the solution, as the parent suggested. Corporations can do whatever they want if they don't fear consequences, regardless of legislation. The Chinese, on the other hand, actually manage their country as a big company. All citizens are their employees - they have strict limits on what they can and can't do, and the bosses don't really care abour them. Other corporations are a form of subsidiary that usually won't try to play their boss. If someone is caught damaging the company product or image, it is "fired", as in executed.
Companies exist to make money. Most of them won't be willing to spend that much to eliminate protesters, and a public company may face serious difficulties if the CEO or the managing board are victim of an assassination, untimely death or unfortunate incident. There are many ways of making it happen, if someone is motivated enough.
I did not say regulations are cumberstone and unnecessary. I just pointed out that "the government" isn't necessarily a solution, and usually is incredible slow and stupid at regulating stuff. But then there's the chinese...
I do know that the swift justice was a direct consequence of the damage done to the country as an exporter and they needed to "save face". So once again, they reacted when they were hit on their wallet. If you think a bit about it, the chinese government runs the country exactly as a company, and not as a regulator. They enforce whatever laws suits their goals - at an economic, social or political level.
What? The same government that ALLOWS for groups of interest with very deep pockets to influence legislation, going as far as even recognizing this activity as a full-time job? They did something out of interest to honor all those nice donations? I'm shocked.
Corporations don't need to donate infinite funds anonymously - they can actually do it almost directly (trough fundraising events and lobbying), or go the cheapest way - put shareholders or employees in key political positions.
How is expected that a government that is selected from, subsidized and elected from a pool of big corporation managers, shareholders and lawyers, represent and defend the interests of the people? And how can it happen when it is legal for companies to actively try to bribe in many ways those elected?
Even if you consider all the contamination testimonies and reports garbage, there is no evidence fracking doesn't impact any water supply, and in fact companies go to great lengths to keep the sludge ingredient list a secret, so you don't know if they're pollutants or hazardous water-solutable chemicals or not.
So, all the things you described happened without a government regulating stuff? And wouln't it be better if you could just, say shoot them in the head, when something like this threatens you, your safety or your family safety?
The billions gambled in Wall Street were backed by the government. In fact, the government you praise bail them out. How many arrests were made in the recent Wall Street scandals? The examples you mentioned from China were handled swiftly and severely - those responsible for milk contamination, for example, were executed as a warning to others.
The freedom of choice - to write good, manageable code, or to write some soup-tag mess. You can write structured code in assembly, or just slap in some instructions to test some proof of concept.
Having professionally programmed in Cobol, indented languages are a horrible horrible concept that impose artificial constraints in the sake of legibility for those who can't actually decipher the code, and should be reading comments instead. I've tried Python, and while it feels more versatile than PHP out of the web environment, there's not that much of a difference to justify the change.
For me, the Python programmer is a bit like the PHP programmer - if you can only use Python (or PHP), you're not a programmer.
Maybe you know more than I do - but I never read the claim that those companies you mentioned are running stock Java, or plain old C++ without some heavy tweaks and magic juice to suit their needs. Not that Facebook doesn't use those technologies - in fact, Facebook is, for example, one of the major users of Hadoop. So, if a major company tweaks Java or C++ or whatever to suit their needs is ok because it's a "language you approve", but if other company tweaks PHP, it's bad decause PHP is bad? ...And yes, PHP can be run on JVM. And can be compiled to.NET assemblies. Maybe it won't run as fast as Java (I don't know, never used it that way). And yes, I do agree with you, choosing PHP probably was a terrible design decision. As it would have been Ruby, Perl, Python and many other languages. But what you lose in execution time you gain in development time. How much it took (in time and money) to go from a fast prototype to a production installation?
My point is, not everyone needs to write facebook, development time is often a lot more expensive than hardware, and just because they decided to tweak their platform doesn't mean necessarily that the language is "bad". And those who _do_ write facebook, already use many of the alternative technologies you mentioned.
How did you went from "php is probably not the better choice" for "C++ or Java probably will do it"? Because they made a C++ translator, or because you think what they implemented is a Java concept?
Replying to your other comment, there is also a difference between "this doesn't work" and "lets save a ton of money on servers and such by running binary instances of our applications and squeeze some more requests/s". Facebook did the PHP/C++ translator because of economic reasons, not because PHP couldn't scale.
But yes, in retrospective, I also share the opinion that using PHP (and MySQL) for something like facebook was a terrible design option. That doesn't mean it didn't worked.
Saying PHP is full of bad practices is a bit like saying assembly is full of bad practices - with freedom comes responsability. The documentation by itself isn't stellar, but there are tons of available books and (good)articles that can help you on the first steps. Most of the "poor code" you mention are actually poor algorithmic implementations, but then again the documentation isn't there to teach you how to program - is there to show you the syntax and the different options available.
In many modern processors, you don't really need to "hand count" instructions, you can probe the performance counters. In many microcontrollers, you can do the same with one of the timers. By your description, I'm assuming you are using the oscilloscope on a somewhat standard serial connection without buffering. If you'd try it over a buffered connection (such as a decent network card), you'd see (and given that you can actually use an oscilloscope, you probably already know that) why there is no direct relation between bitrate and interrupt rate. I'd argue that a device driver/os developer that would be impressed by that probably is lacking in many areas.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm shure there is a racist joke here somewhere...
Sorry, too quick to submit. You should use Aperture Priority and not Speed Priority.
My wife is a professional photographer and consultant, I sometimes use her equipment to take some shots. But I can give you some hints based on what I know:
You will need a DSLR camera. Sometimes you can take good shots with a compact camera, sometimes you can't. Professional-looking equipment is also part of the show, so people will bother you less if you look like a professional.
You usually won't be able to make good close-ups from far away without a tripod (and you probably won't get inside with a tripod), so you'll need to be close to the stage. Work with your camera in manual mode or speed priority, use a lens with a good aperture (be aware that below f/1.8 many not-so outrageusly expensive lenses may suffer from severe chromatic aberrations), use a sensible ISO value for the lens aperture and the kind of venue, and be aware that you probably won't take good pictures using the camera on your hands with speeds below 1/20s. If many variables confuse you, you may try a fixed aperture lens - you can probably find something like f1.8/50mm cheap, that will allow you to do good close-ups. As I said, I've used a common 18-55mm/3.5-5.6 with good results, but with a f/1.8 lens you'll be able to take dark photos and capture all the essence of the moment.
Some (good) photographers use speelites (those flashes you put on top of your camera) for floodfilling. You point your flash to the ceiling, and on a minimal setting, so it will "light up" the scene or the background without causing too much damage. Many use filters to scatter the flashlight and/or a small reflector to minimize impact on the public. Some (bad) photographers just think they need it, and spend all the time they have ruining other people's photos with light contamination.
One final note regarding equipment - live concerts are terrible for cameras, be aware that you may have to send your machine and lenses to be cleaned every year or so. The cigarrete smoke and from special effects machines will slowly make your machine dirty.
Now the good stuff - how to get in & get away with it: Get a professional-looking DSLR! If it is a local venue, you can contact the organization previously and ask for permission to take pictures, They usually allow it if you give them a copy of the resulting pictures. Many times you can score a free ticket if you already have portfolio. If the organization doesn't respond you, sometimes contacting the band directly works, but don't expect a free ticket. If nothing works, park near the venue and try to go in with the camera, they probably won't stop you if you look like a "photographer".
With smaller bands, they won't care if your photographing or not, specially if not using a flash at all. In bigger venues, expect to have a limited time to take pictures (usually the 2 first songs). I've actually seen concerts where the band stopped the concert until everyone stopped flashing their eyes.
Authorization from the organizers usually will allow you to go to the "special zone" between the stage and the public, but not much more. Every other situation may or may not give you access to that, so ask politely to whoever is doing security there.
Don't take my experience as a gospel (I'm from an european country, it may be different where you live), specially because my experience is mainly extreme metal concerts. Last advice - the mosh pit isn't the place to carry expensive equipment, so be careful if you cross it.
The preflash to to eliminate red eyes is a low intensity one, and often photocell-driven photographic equipment won't fire until the real deal.
And it's not obvious how would it work with fill lighting (where you use the flash as a secundary scene light source), or multiple hi-speed sequence shots with a professional speedlite.
It won't work that way. Assuming the device is made as any other professional flash, the speed of the operation will be too fast and the bightness spike duration will be too short to have a cascading effect. I've worked with professional studio flashes, and this behavior don't happen.
I've done concert photography with an f/3.5 lens and 1600 ISO without much issue. Many modern compact cameras also shoot in the infrared range, so you can actually see people without any visible light. Sony even advertised this feature in some models.
So, are you saying an internet mob still behaves like a mob? Interesting :)
My point is showing that just throwing "more government" to the problem isn't the solution, as the parent suggested. Corporations can do whatever they want if they don't fear consequences, regardless of legislation. The Chinese, on the other hand, actually manage their country as a big company. All citizens are their employees - they have strict limits on what they can and can't do, and the bosses don't really care abour them. Other corporations are a form of subsidiary that usually won't try to play their boss. If someone is caught damaging the company product or image, it is "fired", as in executed.
Companies exist to make money. Most of them won't be willing to spend that much to eliminate protesters, and a public company may face serious difficulties if the CEO or the managing board are victim of an assassination, untimely death or unfortunate incident. There are many ways of making it happen, if someone is motivated enough.
I did not say regulations are cumberstone and unnecessary. I just pointed out that "the government" isn't necessarily a solution, and usually is incredible slow and stupid at regulating stuff. But then there's the chinese...
I do know that the swift justice was a direct consequence of the damage done to the country as an exporter and they needed to "save face". So once again, they reacted when they were hit on their wallet. If you think a bit about it, the chinese government runs the country exactly as a company, and not as a regulator. They enforce whatever laws suits their goals - at an economic, social or political level.
What? The same government that ALLOWS for groups of interest with very deep pockets to influence legislation, going as far as even recognizing this activity as a full-time job? They did something out of interest to honor all those nice donations? I'm shocked.
Corporations don't need to donate infinite funds anonymously - they can actually do it almost directly (trough fundraising events and lobbying), or go the cheapest way - put shareholders or employees in key political positions.
How is expected that a government that is selected from, subsidized and elected from a pool of big corporation managers, shareholders and lawyers, represent and defend the interests of the people? And how can it happen when it is legal for companies to actively try to bribe in many ways those elected?
So, to resume, it will happen when pigs fly and people stop liking money and stuff.
So we can all take your word for it, then?
The onus of proof rests on the accuser. But if you live in the USA, tough luck - it seems this kind of bullying is somehow legal.
Even if you consider all the contamination testimonies and reports garbage, there is no evidence fracking doesn't impact any water supply, and in fact companies go to great lengths to keep the sludge ingredient list a secret, so you don't know if they're pollutants or hazardous water-solutable chemicals or not.
So, all the things you described happened without a government regulating stuff? And wouln't it be better if you could just, say shoot them in the head, when something like this threatens you, your safety or your family safety?
The billions gambled in Wall Street were backed by the government. In fact, the government you praise bail them out. How many arrests were made in the recent Wall Street scandals? The examples you mentioned from China were handled swiftly and severely - those responsible for milk contamination, for example, were executed as a warning to others.
The freedom of choice - to write good, manageable code, or to write some soup-tag mess. You can write structured code in assembly, or just slap in some instructions to test some proof of concept.
Having professionally programmed in Cobol, indented languages are a horrible horrible concept that impose artificial constraints in the sake of legibility for those who can't actually decipher the code, and should be reading comments instead. I've tried Python, and while it feels more versatile than PHP out of the web environment, there's not that much of a difference to justify the change.
For me, the Python programmer is a bit like the PHP programmer - if you can only use Python (or PHP), you're not a programmer.
Actually I meant C. C# is a .NET language. But don't worry, I'm too lazy to re-invent the wheel, so don't expect a new language out of me :)
Maybe you know more than I do - but I never read the claim that those companies you mentioned are running stock Java, or plain old C++ without some heavy tweaks and magic juice to suit their needs. Not that Facebook doesn't use those technologies - in fact, Facebook is, for example, one of the major users of Hadoop. So, if a major company tweaks Java or C++ or whatever to suit their needs is ok because it's a "language you approve", but if other company tweaks PHP, it's bad decause PHP is bad?
...And yes, PHP can be run on JVM. And can be compiled to .NET assemblies. Maybe it won't run as fast as Java (I don't know, never used it that way). And yes, I do agree with you, choosing PHP probably was a terrible design decision. As it would have been Ruby, Perl, Python and many other languages. But what you lose in execution time you gain in development time. How much it took (in time and money) to go from a fast prototype to a production installation?
My point is, not everyone needs to write facebook, development time is often a lot more expensive than hardware, and just because they decided to tweak their platform doesn't mean necessarily that the language is "bad". And those who _do_ write facebook, already use many of the alternative technologies you mentioned.
How did you went from "php is probably not the better choice" for "C++ or Java probably will do it"? Because they made a C++ translator, or because you think what they implemented is a Java concept?
Replying to your other comment, there is also a difference between "this doesn't work" and "lets save a ton of money on servers and such by running binary instances of our applications and squeeze some more requests/s". Facebook did the PHP/C++ translator because of economic reasons, not because PHP couldn't scale.
But yes, in retrospective, I also share the opinion that using PHP (and MySQL) for something like facebook was a terrible design option. That doesn't mean it didn't worked.
Is it different than mantaining other people's (C++/C+/.NET/Delphi/Cobol/Java/Ruby/Whatever) inspired garbage?
So, it's a bit like every other language, then?
Saying PHP is full of bad practices is a bit like saying assembly is full of bad practices - with freedom comes responsability. The documentation by itself isn't stellar, but there are tons of available books and (good)articles that can help you on the first steps. Most of the "poor code" you mention are actually poor algorithmic implementations, but then again the documentation isn't there to teach you how to program - is there to show you the syntax and the different options available.
In many modern processors, you don't really need to "hand count" instructions, you can probe the performance counters. In many microcontrollers, you can do the same with one of the timers. By your description, I'm assuming you are using the oscilloscope on a somewhat standard serial connection without buffering. If you'd try it over a buffered connection (such as a decent network card), you'd see (and given that you can actually use an oscilloscope, you probably already know that) why there is no direct relation between bitrate and interrupt rate. I'd argue that a device driver/os developer that would be impressed by that probably is lacking in many areas.