Olympics

Olympics: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Article.
"And here's a prediction: In the run-up to the 2012 Olympics, Londoners will complain about the traffic; politicians will carp about the cost; critics will call the ceremonies tasteless; no one will use the phrase Olympic triumph. But there won't be arrests or police intimidation; there won't be forced expropriation of property; there won't be stony-faced acrobats marching in formation—and in the end, the whole thing will be a lot less sinister, a lot less damaging, and a lot more fun."

Camera rumors

The next four weeks will have many camera announcements as we near Photokina in Germany in late September.
And it seems there will be several very interesting cameras. A couple of important upgrades from Canon, possibly a rangefinder from Nikon, and for sure the eagerly anticipated Nikon D90, which looks kewl. I like that it looks like it is compact. (In fact it looks like it will be not much larger than the D40, which is fantastic.)
And a 3200 ISO setting is most welcome. It seems it will also be the first DSLR to do video.

There'll also be a new kit lens for it, a 18-105 mm with stabilization. If this lens is in the new higher optical quality that many new lenses in the past year have been*, then that's highly interesting. A compact, high-quality all round kit in one.

*It seems to me that there has been a quantum leap in optical engeneering in the past couple of years. New lenses are coming out that are far better than anything has been in their respective classes before.

Lawrence Ripsher

Review of Panasonic LX3.

Apart from a hot wife, Lawrence also has some good points about high ISO:
"... the presence of noise is vastly overrated (misunderstood) as a way of judging high ISO. The presence of noise in images is not always a huge problem - the real issue that is faced with with high ISO images is usually the destruction of colour and dynamic range. This is something that noise reduction algorithms can never effectively repair and a image with poor colour / DR is very evident even at web resolution sizes."

PixlR

Online image editor, PixlR.

Online apps have come a long way, I'd have thought they still were unusable due to latency.

Drive fast, live long

Hyperdither

Just found a fun little app, Hyperdither.
You can do something similar in Photoshop, but this app gives a better result, and faster.
The dithering routine was written by Bill Atkinson for the first Mac.

RetroMacCast

I prefer vintage cameras over vintage computers (and I don't have the space for the latter), but here's a fun little thing, RetroMacCast. In just one episode, they mention several oddball items I never knew existed. And they interview Tommy Thomas, who writes for a nice site named Low End Mac.

Brainiac and Bert

Very cool comic.


And something different:



Both things pointed to by Litwack.

Physical and limited

I am of the persuasion of those who believe the universe is not real, but created by the Mind.
And it seems provable to me.

Since the universe is physical, it must be limited.
But what is it limited by? Anything that can limit it would have to be in the universe.
So clearly the universe can't be real.

The second part seems bullet-proof to me, but the first part merely seems obvious. How do you prove that something which is physical has to be limited?

Longsightedness

The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, 'In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!'

Abstination

Three couples - a senior citizen couple, a middle-aged couple, and a young newlywed couple - wanted to join a church.

The pastor informed them, "We have special requirements for new parishioners. We require them to abstain from having s*e*x for two weeks before joining the church. Are you ready to do that?" The couples said they were.

Two weeks later, the three couples returned.

The pastor asked the senior citizen couple, "Were you able to abstain for the entire two weeks?"

The old man replied, "No problem at all, Pastor."

"Congratulations!" said the pastor. "Welcome to the church."

The pastor then asked the middle-aged couple, "Were you able to abstain for the two weeks?"

The man replied, "The first week was not too bad. The second week I had to sleep on the couch for a couple of nights but, yes, we made it."

"Congratulations!" the pastor said once again. "Welcome to the church."

The pastor then asked the newlywed couple, "Well, were you able to abstain for the two weeks?"

"I must apologize, Pastor," the young man said, "but we were not able to."

"What happened?" inquired the pastor.

"Well, we almost made it, but then just yesterday, my wife was reaching for a can of corn on the top shelf and dropped it," the young man explained. "When she bent over to pick it up, I was overcome with lust and couldn't resist taking advantage of her right then and there."

"I see," said the pastor. "You understand, of course, this means you will not be able to join our church," he added. "I'm sorry." The young couple left the pastor's office.

"I can't believe it!" the wife said as they walked outside. "Banned from both church and the supermarket in the same week!"

Horses for courses

Like Mike Reichman likes to remind us, "horses for corses". Or in other words, you use the right tool for the job, and it's often different tools for different jobs.

Here's a nice little article which reminds us that even really "bad" characteristics of a lens, like vignetting and low corner sharpness are necessarily bad for all uses.

I own the lens he talks about (Nikkor 70-200mm 2.8 VR), and it is huge and expensive ($2,000), so I was quite disappointed when it turned out that on full frame cameras it is just lousy in the corners. This article made me look at it in a new light.
(That's not to say that Nikon should not upgrade the lens, because for many uses these flaws are fatal.)

Howard sed:
A friend had one of the earliest Nokia camera mobile 'phones. She bought a removeable cover for it, which had a bevel all round the window for the lens. The quality of the images was pretty poor - tiny lens and barely 1MP - but that bevel added a lovely soft focus feel to the images! In the right conditions the images pretty cool!
Reminds me of the photography course I took a few years back. The pro taking the class said something that has stayed with me. It was words to the effect that "your brain is what actually takes the pictures, the camera is just a tool to make them permanent."