This was never a problem until NASA had to change to a non-freon coolant in the 90s, in order to comply with EPA regulations. Can't NASA get an exemption from this? Is freon that so bad that we can't even afford to allow the Shuttle to use it, at the expense of a kludgy workaround that has, to date, claimed 7 lives?
People getting on anti-biotics for common colds really pisses me off. Just today someone at work said they wanted to go see their doctor for some anti-biotics. I had a hard time cleaning my comments to him of the dripping sarcasm. "You do realize that the common cold is a VIRAL infection, and anti-biotics kill BACTERIA, and will therefore be totally useless except to contribute to the anti-biotic tolerance of bacteria?"
It went over his head. He honestly had no clue what I was talking about. And I work with supposedly intelligent, educated people.
If so, they'd be the first significant Christian group in history to widely believe that the earth is flat. Flat-earthism is a mid 19th century myth invented by Washington Irving.
And as a coincidence, though I knew this before, i just finished reading a chapter on the subject in Umberto Eco's Serendipities.
If scientists are supposed to be the objective ones, stop spreading such mythologies such as this. Every significant Christian writer who addressed the subject at all conceeded that the Earth was round. History only reveals a total of 4 Christian writers who disagreed, all of them obscure.
I never realized how much I used this feature until it was gone -
Sometimes if I see that a certain author has a lot of insight about the group topic, I search only his/her posts for a given subject, to see what they've had to say about it in the past.
Now with masking, I can't just click on an author's name and get a listing of just their posts, or do an advanced search by author.
Plus the new interface is just busy clunky - apparently they're forgetting one thing that makes Google so nice to use - simplicity of interfaces.
I get my information from a) the saturated, data-less highlights I tend to see in many digital images, be they on a Canon A70 or a Nikon D100 (for ghastly examples of the latter look at the sample images on dpreview).
b) Ken Rockwell, a professional filmographer who shoots digital video for a living:
"Highlight Rendition: Digital still has a huge problem with highlight reproduction, presuming you, like me, shoot into the sun or other sources of light. Film for hundreds of years has naturally had "shoulders" in its characteristic curve. This means that even with severe overexposure in places that the highlights are rendered naturally on film, even contrasty slide film like the Velvia I love.
"On the other hand, at the dawn of the 21st century digital capture is more linear than log as film is. This means that digital cameras often have better shadow detail than my Velvia, but can have horrid, unnatural highlights if overexposed even a third of a stop.
"Specifically, digital clips hard as soon as you are a few stops over zone V. This could be OK, however unfortunately in color one of the three color channels (red, green or blue) usually clips first, throwing the hue (color) into all sorts of weird shifts in the areas the image transitions from bright to pure white. This is why digital camera images may show all sorts of nasty, unnatural hue (color) shifts in the brightest areas.
"Unfortunately this highlight issue is a basic characteristic of CCD sensors, amplifiers and sampling and quantization electronics and won't be fixed soon. To simulate film's shoulder one needs to add several more stops of highlight capture in the digital camera so the image processing electronics can use this information to simulate a decent shoulder curve. CCDs and the related capture electronics will need about ten times more dynamic range (three stops) than they have today to be able to simulate film's shoulder. Of course negative film has more range still, but that's not really relevant to good photography since the dynamic range of negative film already exceeds what you ought to be photographing. For instance, a negative can be way overexposed and still retain detail in otherwise blown out highlights, if you custom print and burn in those areas. Heck, you can scan a negative from a $6 disposable camera and have more highlight dynamic range than any digital capture system.
"The $100,000 three-CCD studio high-definition television cameras around which I work today still have problems with this, and so our cheap $5,000 single-striped CCD digital SLRs will, too. Everyone is working on solving this. This is the biggest image defect in digital cameras today."
There are plenty of ways in which you can capture huge dynamic ranges with digital sensors. One is to take multiple exposures with regular sensors and combine them digitally. Another is to use sensors designed for capturing larger dynamic ranges, using a variety of electronic tricks or using multiple different sensors on the same piece of silicon.
Digital sensors still cannot handle highlight's nearly as well as even slide film, much less B&W negative film. While you can turn relative shadows into highlights with photoshop, and this does work to some extent, it assumes the luxury of having the time to take multiple exposures. This only works for a subset of images. Some of Ansel's most famous pictures were taken with seconds to spare, such as the full moon over half dome. As the story goes, he saw it, screeched to a halt in his car and captured the image just before the moon went out of sight. Also, given that the moon moves fairly quickly across the sky, multiple images would have yielded a moon in slightly different places on each frame. That brings me to the next part:
Which is why there are plenty of digital backs for view cameras.
The digital scanning backs available today are really only pracitical for studio work with inanimate objects. They require you to bring a laptop around with you, hook it all up, and wait several minutes for the exposure to be taken. Its not practical for landscapes, where light changes, shadows move, things move in and out of the frame, the wind blows, etc. Its a different beast than the CMOS sensors available for medium format cameras.
The question here isn't whether or not it can be done. I maintain that its debateable at this point. As a 4x5 shooter myself (who can appreciate the difference every time I turn on my lightbox), I say no, not with the current state of technology, given Ansel's standards and the rapid light changes landscape photographers have to deal with.
Ansel Adams would not use digital in its current form for any of his work. Ansel did use 8x10" large format for most of his career, but later in life when he could no longer hike with his 8x10" view camera and enormous surveyors tripod, he used 6x6cm Hassleblad systems.
There are many other advantages to using sheet film above and beyond the incredible resolution it provides. If you've ever read his book, "The Negative", you would see that much of his workflow depended on using sheet film. The "zone system", which he developed, only fully applies to B&W Sheet film emulsions. This involves shooting mutliple sheets of film at the same exposure setting, and developing each one differently to control contrast (N+1, N-1, etc) - see Chapter 10 of "The Negative."
Also, the dynamic range of B&W emulsions is worlds beyond what *any* digital capture can currently achieve. Ansel's books discuss capturing, in the final print, 11 different zones of tonality (Zones 0-10). Sorry, digital simply cannot do that. Period. It is a fact of physics that cannot be disputed.
This was the main reason why Ansel never did much with color (he dabbled with Kodachrome in the 1940s but didn't like the lack of tonal control it gave you - something slide film shares with digital, only digital suffers from it more severely).
Of course, all of this ignores the use of view camera movements that Ansel employed (tilt, shift, rise, draw, etc). Correcting perspective with the lens is no match for what can be done in Photoshop, since the latter method forces you to sacrafice resolution.
I'm not anti-digital by any means. It is indeed at the point of matching 35mm quality-wise, if not pricewise in the next few years (the one digital SLR that truly matches most film is the Canon 10Ds, which will set you back about 8 thousand dollars). However, to suggest that Ansel, who worked with large format B&W, would be using digital today only expressed incredible ignorance of B&W vs Digital issues, Ansel Adams' exacting standards, or more likely both. Dismiss it as marketoid speech.
If you're trying to learn the basics of photography, you'll need to learn how to master exposure. You'll also want the most pleasing visual results possible while doing so.
If you get your manual camera and proceed to shoot color negative film, you may never ever learn your mistakes, and your results will remain mediocre at best. This is because most color negative film is designed for people like grandma with P&S auto-everything cameras, so it needs to have a very, very wide exposure latitude to handle exposure errors of +/- 2 or 3 stops. This is fine if you just want decent prints from your vacation or family Christmas, but if you're trying to take real photographs, its limiting, since you'll never be able to figure out what, if, anything, you did wrong, and the colors are pretty dull compared to pro slide films. Sure, the prints will look properly exposed, but they will also look very dull compared to what you see in magazines and on posters.
If you want to learn exposure and get stunning results, use slide film. Since you wish to use your own darkroom, this may be more economical for you too, you'll just need some new chemicals. Slide film has a very narrow exposure latitude and produces positive images that can be viewed without an intermediate printing process that is usually performed by a high school kid earning minimum wage. Differences of 1/3 stop will be apparent so you'll be able to learn. On your properly exposed shots, you will get far fewer washed out skies. You will get colors so stunning colors that you will literally laugh with joy the first time you go through a set of slides. Want your landscapes colors to look as good as National Geographic's? Well first, be there when the light is good. Secondly, use Fuji Velvia. They do.
Depending on what you plan to shoot, I can recommend the following films:
All of these are super high resolution and fine grained. I've printed 35mm examples up to 10x15" with stunning results, and medium format Velvia shots up to 16x24 that look so good that you just can't possibly appreciate the difference medium format makes until you see it.
I recommend buying the film from B&H Photo Video or Adorama, since they have great prices compared to any local photo store (1/3 to 1/2 the price).
Reinheitsgebot doesn't allow for the addition of dihydrogen monoxide (h2o)? How the hell do they make it, then? Of course, I'm sure you're just joking:)
Also, it is technically possible to play a harpsichord at more than one volume, but the method is not workable during real performances.
Basically (and this only works sometimes), if you press a key down very slowly, the plectrum will actually pull the string down further, building more tension, before letting it go, which sounds the note louder. As I said though, this won't work if you have to play anything faster than, oh, 15 bpm or so.
Actually, you CAN feel the hammers hit...whatever hammer-action digital pianos hit. My Roland F-90 has a progressive hammer-action, which uses real hammers. Many Yamaha models have this as well, and I suspect the same goes for Kawai, Technics, etc.
Of course, this is Roland's lowest model with this feature, weighing in at $1500.
Finally, Columbus never made it to what we thing of as America, unless you count finding a American Virgin Island or two. In five trips he never set sight on the mainland. And it's false that everyone though the world was flat! Aristotle determined it wasn't. Columbus's error was he significantly underestimated the diameter.
Also of note is that fact that the round Earth theory was also an official teaching of the Catholic Church at the time, judging by the fact that its explicitly taught in the Summa Theologica (14th century, St. Thomas Aquinas), by far the most influential and authoratative theological work of the era.
I'm curious to know where the idea of a flat earth really came from. Did people really believe that? Who were the proponents? Was it something that elementary school teachers just made up to make the story sound more dramatic?
The confusion over the book of Esther (and Daniel) stems from the part that these books have additional chapters in the Catholic canon. For instance, the Catholic book of Daniel includes the chapter on Bel and the Dragon, and the Catholic version of Esther has some additional content such as the prayers of Mordecai, the text of the royal decrees, etc., which is generally regarded as apocryphal by Protestant and Hebrew scholars.
Slashdot Mirror
This was never a problem until NASA had to change to a non-freon coolant in the 90s, in order to comply with EPA regulations. Can't NASA get an exemption from this? Is freon that so bad that we can't even afford to allow the Shuttle to use it, at the expense of a kludgy workaround that has, to date, claimed 7 lives?
People getting on anti-biotics for common colds really pisses me off. Just today someone at work said they wanted to go see their doctor for some anti-biotics. I had a hard time cleaning my comments to him of the dripping sarcasm. "You do realize that the common cold is a VIRAL infection, and anti-biotics kill BACTERIA, and will therefore be totally useless except to contribute to the anti-biotic tolerance of bacteria?"
It went over his head. He honestly had no clue what I was talking about. And I work with supposedly intelligent, educated people.
Sigh...
If so, they'd be the first significant Christian group in history to widely believe that the earth is flat. Flat-earthism is a mid 19th century myth invented by Washington Irving.
And as a coincidence, though I knew this before, i just finished reading a chapter on the subject in Umberto Eco's Serendipities.
If scientists are supposed to be the objective ones, stop spreading such mythologies such as this. Every significant Christian writer who addressed the subject at all conceeded that the Earth was round. History only reveals a total of 4 Christian writers who disagreed, all of them obscure.
It would be a shame to replace Mark Knopfler's wonderful score with stupid show tunes.
Also, it will be sweet to get a flying skateboard and a car that has a Mr. Fusion installed.
"whereas tracking and killing innocent animals on foot is just fine"
Come on, tell us your true feelings...
SIMMs are a lot more expensive now that hardly anybody uses them anymore. Read it carefully.
I never realized how much I used this feature until it was gone -
Sometimes if I see that a certain author has a lot of insight about the group topic, I search only his/her posts for a given subject, to see what they've had to say about it in the past.
Now with masking, I can't just click on an author's name and get a listing of just their posts, or do an advanced search by author.
Plus the new interface is just busy clunky - apparently they're forgetting one thing that makes Google so nice to use - simplicity of interfaces.
Any idea what DVD that is?
They locked their keys inside...
b) Ken Rockwell, a professional filmographer who shoots digital video for a living:
I quote from Kenrockwell.com
"Highlight Rendition: Digital still has a huge problem with highlight reproduction, presuming you, like me, shoot into the sun or other sources of light. Film for hundreds of years has naturally had "shoulders" in its characteristic curve. This means that even with severe overexposure in places that the highlights are rendered naturally on film, even contrasty slide film like the Velvia I love.
"On the other hand, at the dawn of the 21st century digital capture is more linear than log as film is. This means that digital cameras often have better shadow detail than my Velvia, but can have horrid, unnatural highlights if overexposed even a third of a stop.
"Specifically, digital clips hard as soon as you are a few stops over zone V. This could be OK, however unfortunately in color one of the three color channels (red, green or blue) usually clips first, throwing the hue (color) into all sorts of weird shifts in the areas the image transitions from bright to pure white. This is why digital camera images may show all sorts of nasty, unnatural hue (color) shifts in the brightest areas.
"Unfortunately this highlight issue is a basic characteristic of CCD sensors, amplifiers and sampling and quantization electronics and won't be fixed soon. To simulate film's shoulder one needs to add several more stops of highlight capture in the digital camera so the image processing electronics can use this information to simulate a decent shoulder curve. CCDs and the related capture electronics will need about ten times more dynamic range (three stops) than they have today to be able to simulate film's shoulder. Of course negative film has more range still, but that's not really relevant to good photography since the dynamic range of negative film already exceeds what you ought to be photographing. For instance, a negative can be way overexposed and still retain detail in otherwise blown out highlights, if you custom print and burn in those areas. Heck, you can scan a negative from a $6 disposable camera and have more highlight dynamic range than any digital capture system.
"The $100,000 three-CCD studio high-definition television cameras around which I work today still have problems with this, and so our cheap $5,000 single-striped CCD digital SLRs will, too. Everyone is working on solving this. This is the biggest image defect in digital cameras today."
Digital sensors still cannot handle highlight's nearly as well as even slide film, much less B&W negative film. While you can turn relative shadows into highlights with photoshop, and this does work to some extent, it assumes the luxury of having the time to take multiple exposures. This only works for a subset of images. Some of Ansel's most famous pictures were taken with seconds to spare, such as the full moon over half dome. As the story goes, he saw it, screeched to a halt in his car and captured the image just before the moon went out of sight. Also, given that the moon moves fairly quickly across the sky, multiple images would have yielded a moon in slightly different places on each frame. That brings me to the next part:
Which is why there are plenty of digital backs for view cameras.
The digital scanning backs available today are really only pracitical for studio work with inanimate objects. They require you to bring a laptop around with you, hook it all up, and wait several minutes for the exposure to be taken. Its not practical for landscapes, where light changes, shadows move, things move in and out of the frame, the wind blows, etc. Its a different beast than the CMOS sensors available for medium format cameras.
The question here isn't whether or not it can be done. I maintain that its debateable at this point. As a 4x5 shooter myself (who can appreciate the difference every time I turn on my lightbox), I say no, not with the current state of technology, given Ansel's standards and the rapid light changes landscape photographers have to deal with.
Mod the parent up. Its a very, very good point.
Ansel Adams would not use digital in its current form for any of his work. Ansel did use 8x10" large format for most of his career, but later in life when he could no longer hike with his 8x10" view camera and enormous surveyors tripod, he used 6x6cm Hassleblad systems.
There are many other advantages to using sheet film above and beyond the incredible resolution it provides. If you've ever read his book, "The Negative", you would see that much of his workflow depended on using sheet film. The "zone system", which he developed, only fully applies to B&W Sheet film emulsions. This involves shooting mutliple sheets of film at the same exposure setting, and developing each one differently to control contrast (N+1, N-1, etc) - see Chapter 10 of "The Negative."
Also, the dynamic range of B&W emulsions is worlds beyond what *any* digital capture can currently achieve. Ansel's books discuss capturing, in the final print, 11 different zones of tonality (Zones 0-10). Sorry, digital simply cannot do that. Period. It is a fact of physics that cannot be disputed.
This was the main reason why Ansel never did much with color (he dabbled with Kodachrome in the 1940s but didn't like the lack of tonal control it gave you - something slide film shares with digital, only digital suffers from it more severely).
Of course, all of this ignores the use of view camera movements that Ansel employed (tilt, shift, rise, draw, etc). Correcting perspective with the lens is no match for what can be done in Photoshop, since the latter method forces you to sacrafice resolution.
I'm not anti-digital by any means. It is indeed at the point of matching 35mm quality-wise, if not pricewise in the next few years (the one digital SLR that truly matches most film is the Canon 10Ds, which will set you back about 8 thousand dollars). However, to suggest that Ansel, who worked with large format B&W, would be using digital today only expressed incredible ignorance of B&W vs Digital issues, Ansel Adams' exacting standards, or more likely both. Dismiss it as marketoid speech.
...is film selection.
If you're trying to learn the basics of photography, you'll need to learn how to master exposure. You'll also want the most pleasing visual results possible while doing so.
If you get your manual camera and proceed to shoot color negative film, you may never ever learn your mistakes, and your results will remain mediocre at best. This is because most color negative film is designed for people like grandma with P&S auto-everything cameras, so it needs to have a very, very wide exposure latitude to handle exposure errors of +/- 2 or 3 stops. This is fine if you just want decent prints from your vacation or family Christmas, but if you're trying to take real photographs, its limiting, since you'll never be able to figure out what, if, anything, you did wrong, and the colors are pretty dull compared to pro slide films. Sure, the prints will look properly exposed, but they will also look very dull compared to what you see in magazines and on posters.
If you want to learn exposure and get stunning results, use slide film. Since you wish to use your own darkroom, this may be more economical for you too, you'll just need some new chemicals. Slide film has a very narrow exposure latitude and produces positive images that can be viewed without an intermediate printing process that is usually performed by a high school kid earning minimum wage. Differences of 1/3 stop will be apparent so you'll be able to learn. On your properly exposed shots, you will get far fewer washed out skies. You will get colors so stunning colors that you will literally laugh with joy the first time you go through a set of slides. Want your landscapes colors to look as good as National Geographic's? Well first, be there when the light is good. Secondly, use Fuji Velvia. They do.
Depending on what you plan to shoot, I can recommend the following films:
Portraits/night shots: Fuji Astia 100/100F
Landscapes: Fuji Velvia/Kodak E100GX
General purpose: Fuji Provia 100F
All of these are super high resolution and fine grained. I've printed 35mm examples up to 10x15" with stunning results, and medium format Velvia shots up to 16x24 that look so good that you just can't possibly appreciate the difference medium format makes until you see it.
I recommend buying the film from B&H Photo Video or Adorama, since they have great prices compared to any local photo store (1/3 to 1/2 the price).
See my webpage for examples using these films.
The top rated comment in this thread will be "Score:5, Funny." How predictable...
Can a pinball "style" machine be played by sense of smell?
Actually its not - its Helium. There isn't enough oxygen up there to burn fuel to make the air hot.
Reinheitsgebot doesn't allow for the addition of dihydrogen monoxide (h2o)? How the hell do they make it, then? Of course, I'm sure you're just joking :)
10 is binary for '2'...
Also, it is technically possible to play a harpsichord at more than one volume, but the method is not workable during real performances. Basically (and this only works sometimes), if you press a key down very slowly, the plectrum will actually pull the string down further, building more tension, before letting it go, which sounds the note louder. As I said though, this won't work if you have to play anything faster than, oh, 15 bpm or so.
Actually, you CAN feel the hammers hit...whatever hammer-action digital pianos hit. My Roland F-90 has a progressive hammer-action, which uses real hammers. Many Yamaha models have this as well, and I suspect the same goes for Kawai, Technics, etc. Of course, this is Roland's lowest model with this feature, weighing in at $1500.
Also of note is that fact that the round Earth theory was also an official teaching of the Catholic Church at the time, judging by the fact that its explicitly taught in the Summa Theologica (14th century, St. Thomas Aquinas), by far the most influential and authoratative theological work of the era. I'm curious to know where the idea of a flat earth really came from. Did people really believe that? Who were the proponents? Was it something that elementary school teachers just made up to make the story sound more dramatic?
The confusion over the book of Esther (and Daniel) stems from the part that these books have additional chapters in the Catholic canon. For instance, the Catholic book of Daniel includes the chapter on Bel and the Dragon, and the Catholic version of Esther has some additional content such as the prayers of Mordecai, the text of the royal decrees, etc., which is generally regarded as apocryphal by Protestant and Hebrew scholars.
I think I'd use it to encrypt stuff.