Walls and light

Well, if the set below was "street photography" as humorously suggested, then this must be "wall art". Gentlemen, start your groans.

Pilot lands safely after going blind in mid-air

[Thanks to TC.] Pilot lands safely after going blind in mid-air, article.
Man, that's gotta suck. Amazing story.

Cobbles and more

Interestingly, it's only after the advent of digital printing and viewing that these pictures are interesting: the originals are very low contrast, very flat and boring. It is impossible to boost contrast in traditional color prints, but in digital, it the work of seconds.

An original:

Two girls

A contest judge who saw this said that the girl on the left had just spotted a hot guy. Well, that would be me. I took this picture with a wide-angle lens, and with the camera on the table, without looking in the viewfinder. I think she is wondering what I'm doing, but since I didn't look at them, she didn't say anything.

I got very lucky, not only is the composition perfect without me looking in the viewfinder, but also I'd forgotten to reset an exposure compensation from earlier. If I hadn't done that, the light in the middle would have caused the picture to be underexposed. And also because I was very slow in learning that the Pentax ME Super I had actually underexposed everything by at least a half stop, maybe a full one, so a lot of what I photographed then was badly underexposed.


Oh, I just noticed now from old notes that this one won a regional competition. And another of mine got second place. Not only that, but the judge said that those two were well above the whole rest of the entries. At seventeen I was feeling pretty damn smug that day, you bet! :-)

Diffraction

An odd and irritating fact about photographic sharpness is that even the world's best lens won't get around "diffraction" unsharpness, which means that pictures get less sharp at small apertures.
I remember in my youth wanting to make the sharpest pictures I could, and I put the camera on a tripod and stopped down to eleven, and I surprised and frustrated when they just weren't very sharp.
For most lenses, due to compromises in design, a middle aperture like F:5.6 or F:8 is a good bet for sharpest pictures. But the very best ones can actually be sharpest fully open, due to diffraction.

I asked clever-head Ctein (k-tein) about it, and he's writing a series of articles about it, here's the first one. I have to admit it some of it goes above my head.
If you're interested, don't miss the comments under the article.

Grandma

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This one further illustrates my inherent disrespect or disregard for the subject, and my preoccupation with lines, textures, tones, tension in a frame.
Of course you can see it as a statement about age or something, but it's clearly not a portrait of my grandma, which would have included her head.

Eight Reasons Why You Can't Pay Attention

Eight Reasons Why You Can't Pay Attention, article.
Amusingly, the article is on a page with dozens of links and ads all screaming for attention while you're trying to read...
(Thank god for ad blocking software, like Pithhelmet for Safari. Some of my favorite web sites, even some where I'm a paying customer (lovefilm.com) are insufferable without ad blocking.)

One thing I don't get is people who have their TV on all the time, whether they are watching or not. I find it incredibly distracting.

No Clean Feed

It seems the Australian government is working on a plan to filter the Internet country-wide for everybody. This is a site protesting it.

Sister

This is my likkle sister and our playpal. They must be about twelve here. They are both now in their early forties.
They also both still live in the same small town where we grew up.
Same trees, same terrace. In the background you can see one of the first houses which were built where the cherry plantation was/had been. It was very new when this pic was taken.

Canon PowerShot SX10 IS

The new Canon SX10 IS looks interesting. It has a tiltable screen, which I always have found really useful when I've had it. It has a ridiculously long zoom (28mm-560mm, long enough that even with stabilization it might be hard to use).
And from early test images, it looks like it has really nice image quality. It remains to be seen yet how this quality holds up under different zoom lengths, but so far, look at this sample at 80 ISO, and this one at 800 ISO. For a small-sensor camera, this is really good. And it's only $400.

Alternatively one can get a far smaller camera with the same image quality if one does not need the really long zoom. (Sadly the movable screen is not common though.) Or if one can live with a slightly bigger camera and slightly higher price, one can get better low-light capability (bigger sensor) and exchangeable lenses. Decisions, decisions.

Update: I complimented Imaging-Resource on the usefulness of the target they use for some of their testing images (see links above). They said: " We actually put quite a lot of thought into the content of that image. Fine detail, deep shadows, strong highlights, primary colors for hue rendering, lots of tone-on-tone detail across different parts of the color spectrum (the fabric swatches) to smoke out issues with noise reduction processing, etc."

Elf, Mary Steenburgen

Just watching "Elf". If you can stand a Christmas movie, it's a fun one.

In it I was stunned to see Mary Steenburgen looking as beautiful as ever, at over fifty. Her smile is awesome.

It's by Jon Favreau. I was pleased to see that in designing Santa's home and workshop, which could easily have been an unbearable orgy of green and red, they chose to go with light grey tones for everything, walls and furniture, very nice.

Boat and Water

This is from the mid-nineties, when I was photographing again after a break of many years. I'd made and framed a nice print of this and hung it on my wall. One morning I woke up very early, and the sun was just rising. It was sending a beam of light through my windows, and my curtains and objects outside was shaping the beam into a square which (despite a pretty acute angle) was exactly framing this photo on my wall!* I felt like god was shining a light and saying "see what you can do?" Kewl.



* Not only is the chances against that astronomical, but it would also only last for a minute or two, literally, because a sun beam moves very quickly across a wall when it's at an angle.