Spazuk, paintings made with fire

A must-have item for rich heavy-metal fans

(... there must be a few, now heavy metal has been main stream for 20-30 years.)

It took me a while to recognize the subject, but I think this is great, a very funny piece. I love the turn screw on his ankle, and the chain hair. That must be dang heavy to throw around!

About a substance called Sugru

Sugru is a highly useful and fun substance, sort of a combination of moldable rubber and glue. Amazingly it sticks to virtually any surface with chemical glue, including smooth metal or plastic.
It makes many repairs and fun ideas much easier to make. It's not cheap and it takes a day to cure, but it's still worth it. For example I have made grips for a couple of tablets and a camera, and they really help. (Sugru is not very grippy, sadly, so I had to invent a way to put grainyness in. Dabbling the surface with a toothbrush before it dries works pretty well though.)

There is a wealth of ideas on their site. Here is their newsletter.

Below is a grip I made with super-grippy surface. You can also see a strap I put on the tablet case with superglue. I think the strap is even better than a grip, actually, but they are both much better than nothing. I am amazed that four years after iPad One there are still almost no solutions for improving the grip on a tablet, and those that are there demands the whole hand behind the tablet, you can't have the thumb in front to change pages. With mine you can, making one-handed reading much more comfortable.
I cut the front of the case, since when folded back it gets in the way of the strap and grip. You can also put them directly on the device, I've done that with my Kindle Fire HDX.

I could not find a perma-link to this post, so I took a screenshot: 

(clickable)

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Update: 

I have written to the Sugru people with praise and one criticism. They claim that Sugru is heat insulating. I used 24 packs of Sugru on packing a thick ceramic coffee cup (you buy it in bags of 8 tiny packs). I hoped to keep my coffee hot longer. Even with a broad strip of bubble plastic inside it, it did not work. After a couple of minutes the surface of the Sugru gets quite hot. And of course it takes this heat from the coffee, so it gets cold as fast as normal, even with a preheated cup.

I don't like to complain, but I feel that I had wasted an hour and $50, so I felt it was false advertising. I don't think they did so on purpose or maliciously, for packing around a pot handle it probably does some good. And it is only a minor thing which does not take much away from this fun and useful product. 

Daily Arial View

The Daily View site with the cutesy address overv.eu has some often-interesting areal views.

Net issues today?

Here in Lancashire, England, I am having some odd issues with the Net today. Over half the web pages/sites I try to load time out. Don't appear. But sometimes they do, it's all random.

The really odd thing is that I have the same problems whether I use my cable connection or my ADSL connection. (And it also doesn't matter if I use Ethernet or wifi, or if I use my desktop computer or my iPad.)

These are quite independent connections. How can this be? Sunspots?
Does anybody have similar problems? (Argh, if you have you may have given up loading this page...)

André Wickström´s english stand-up in Iceland

I have lost count of how many times readers have asked me: "Eolake, can you please explain, how does Danish sound to a Finn? Particularly one who is trying to amuse people in Iceland?"
And I must admit, for the longest time I have come up short. But thanks to our old friend TTL, I can now deliver!

Update: hmmm... there seems to be issues with the video, try it on Youtube if it does not work for you.

That's how a delighted porcupine sounds

This is so amazing and funny. Sometimes he sounds so human.

"What camera should you buy?"

[Thanks to Bert]

Famed photographer/reviewer Ming Thein has made a quite funny and actually quite truthful InfoGraphic answering "what camera should I buy?" Enjoy!

Lens maker interview, Zeiss Otus etc

Talking about multi-coating and size of lenses, Bert found this very interesting interview with a lens tester from Zeiss.

Canon Reveals ‘World’s Longest’ 4K Cine Lens: A 50-1000mm Monster that Costs $78K

[Thanks to TCGirl]

And big long zoom lenses for cinema is no thing of the past. Canon just came out with this true hulk. Incredible. 1000mm is a *really* long tele, trust me. (With few exceptions, it's the longest anybody makes.)
4K. (4x the pixels of HD)
50-1000mm. Loooong zoom. Surely in top quality.
$78,000. Thus the price...

Sad there's no in-situ photo of this, because I'll bet ya that this is not one you want to try to hand-hold.

It's funny how much is already being invested in 4K resolution cameras and such, when nobody yet has a solution as to how to distribute that extreme resolution...    :-)
Heck, I just invested a minor fortune in spring to get a 4K monitor (only two types were available), and then just yesterday, Apple announces, get this, not only a 4K monitor, a 5K monitor, and it's an iMac! Apple is cwaaaaazy! (There is no "5K" format, it's just Apple's way of saying "we got even more pixels than 4K, bitches".)

Differences in multi-coating

When not in storage, I rarely bother to put lens caps on my lenses, so I decided to get UV filters for the protection of my favorite ones.

It would be stupid to have a lens with fine anti-reflection coating, and then put on a filter with poor multi-coating. (It's called Multi-Coating or "MC", because many years ago, it was only done with one layer, which only dampened reflections of one color, not too effective. I think all lenses today have multi-coating.)

Oh by the way, in this day and age, some makers of multi-coated filters still makes it sound in their promotion that their filter can remove reflections and flare from a lens. This is of course cattle poo. The best they can do is to not add any new ones!

I bought three different brands just for kicks and comparison. Like I expected, the old, big brands Hoya and Cokin look fine, in some light they almost are invisible.

However, Nisi, a brand I had not heard of, seems to have lousy coating. I won't be using that one. See these comparisons, the Nisi (top on both pics) and the Cokin reflecting the same light source.
(I don't know why multi-coating usually leaves green behind as the strongest reflection.)

By the way, the Cokin really is fantastically thin, the frame. Impressive. I doubt that affects the strength of the thread too much (it's shorter), unless you tend to stack filters. But it's good if you want to keep a very compact lens compact, or it's mounted on a super-wideangle where it may cause vignetting (darken the corners). 

If you want one, it has the subtle and humble name of: 

"Cokin 46mm Super Slim Pure Harmonie Multi Coated UV Filter"!

(Yes, Cokin is the one with the square plastic filters which you put in a holder in front of the lens. I heard that if you put them flat on tables, they collect scratches like all-git-out. I can believe it, no frame, and it's only plastic.)

(Photo by Points In Focus)

Are there good photos still to make?

We live in a time where amateur photography is exploding far beyond the dreams of anybody living pre-digitally. If it wasn't true before, it's certainly true now: everything has been photographed thousands of times.
So one might get occasionally into a bit of despair: what's the point of me going on? There's nothing new to photograph.

But then I see a photo like this. It looks much like a Lee Friedlander photo, but a search has revealed no source to me. But anyway, the point is:
There is nothing special about the subject. It's a typical US town street, Baltimore or something,  on an unremarkable day, with all objects in it we see every day. (Albeit from over half a century ago.)

(Click for big)

But that's just the thing, to me: despite all this, I love this photograph. To me, it's excellent art. What a fantastic arrangement of lines. The composition moves me, to me it is beautiful.

And if the Art does not come from the subject, it must come from... Source only knows... The Photograph itself, certainly (or maybe Certainly Not, it's just an object). Maybe the mind of the photographer. Maybe luck. Or inspiration. Maybe higher forces.
And all these things will always exist, no matter how many times something has been photographed.

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Update:
Bron informs: "Street in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania." -- Jack Delano