Looks like I might be about to develop a niche photographing performing artists. Fast primes, monopods, and low-contrast film have their uses. I may have to get a studio and lighing setup for headshots and promo photos though, or maybe rent time at APHID for a while.

35mm film/slides consumer garbage??

Perhaps you have it backwards... Consumer 35mm print film is garbage.. shipped and stored in uncontrolled temperatures, for who knows how long, made to wider tolerances, etc.

To make matters worse, auto-everything volume-lab printing is crap. Well, not crap, just set up to make passable snapshots from crap exposures on crap film, not great prints from great images on great film. They're also often set up to save costs by always scanning at 6MPixel, regardless of the intended print size.

Films like Provia, Portra, and even Sensia and Kodak HD (if you get them fresh) are really good. Processing is really good anywhere that the machine is kept clean and running properly and the chemicals are kept fresh.

Scanning the film yourself is the ticket, even with a cheap scanner like the Konica-Minolta Scan Dual IV (which I use). Once you have the exposure calibrated (use the strip at the beginning of the roll that goes from fogged to unexposed), set the whitebalance (just like with digital, have a photo of someone holding a white card in the same light), lock the settings and scan away. You've just made images far better than the minilab would make, assuming your exposures, composition, and subject matter is good.

From that point on, the images are just the same as images from a dSLR, except with more flattering contrast if shooting pictures of people with print film, and higher resolution for a given capital expense. When you interpolate to different sizes for printing, the grain seems to disappear from 400iso. Just like digital, you can print on your own inkjet, send them to a printing service (mpix or whatever) or take them to a minilab to get prints done. If you take them to the minilab though... tell them to do no corrections or they'll leave the machine on auto-everything and you'll get crap again (but this applies to any image shot with the camera on any mode but the most basic, film or digital).

Sounds like the rantings of a film zealot? No, if I were running a portrait studio (other than high-end), shooting sports, or photojournalism, I'd probably be using a dSLR for their lower cost per picture and faster results. Most of the techniques I use apply to either film or digital equally well.

From this discussion on Photo.net.

I got my 4x5 negs back yesterday... One of them is a really great picture of a tree atop a rocky hill at Pipers Lagoon, but I used too much front tilt to make the rocky hill in focus up it's entire face, and there is severe vignetting (completely black) in the top two corners. Bummer.

On a positive note... I found out I can eliminate newtons rings by scanning the negs emulsion down and mirroring the file in software. The B&W emulsion is too rough to cause newtons rings.

I've been very slowly working on ~200 images that were very badly damaged at the processing lab last november. There are severe scratches and huge amounts of debris all over every image (possibly exhaused developer at the lab? silver still left in the film? (C-41)). Today I found out that

for i in *.tif; echo $i; convert $i -noise 4 $i-good.tif; done

does the job in about 10 minutes per image for all but the worst damage, which I can clean myself given a clean source to clone from. It does lose a little sharpness, but I have more detail than needed anyways.

I just got the new (as of last November) version of Audacity. It now supports stereo recording with the iMic on MacOS. Given a quiet room (blanket over window, only laptop on) and the built in noise reduction filter it's quite easy to create a high-quality low-noise recording. If I can get two microphones and some way to plug them both into the microphone jack I might just finally get around to doing interviews for CHLY.

I was looking for specific formulas for calculating tuned intake and exhaust manifold lengths... From most of the western world I found either over-hyped ads for products and services or general, wish-washy -it's sorta like this but we can't tell you any more because it's a trade secret- information.

So where did I find the actual formulas? A site in Iran.

Now I just have to find out what the "specific heat ratio" is.

Now I'm getting spam advertizing a spam ring...

The issue is whether the DoJ has the right to compel a someone to disclose information without probable cause, nor related to an investigation, but for political reasons.

<?

// This script modifies an OSCommerce-MySQL installation by
//        - removing any expired specials and
//        - optionally putting ALL of the items on sale
//            > this may cause problems if there are non-expired sales.

// DO NOT LEAVE THIS SCRIPT ON YOUR SERVER AFTER RUNNING IT

//Script Parameters

    //debugit -- if true, just echo queries
define("debugit",true);

    //database connection info
define("dbhost","localhost");
define("dbname","");
define("dbuser","");
define("dbpass","");

    //sale info
define("newsale",true);
define("expirydate","2006-02-14");
define("discount",40);

// End of Parameters

// Query Definitions
define("clearexpiredqry","delete from specials where expires_date < now();");
define("getproductsqry","select products_id,products_price from products;");
define("insertspecialqry","Insert into specials(products_id,specials_new_products_price,specials_date_added,expires_date) values (%d, %01.2f,now(),'%s')");

//the actual code

//connect to database
mysql_connect(dbhost,dbuser,dbpass);
mysql_select_db(dbname);

// clear expired specials

if (debugit){echo clearexpiredqry ."<br /><br />\n\n";}else{mysql_query(clearexpiredqry);};
if(!newsale){ exit(0);};

// make the new sales
$result = mysql_query(getproductsqry);
while ($record = mysql_fetch_object($result)){
    $updateqry = sprintf(
        insertspecialqry,
        $record->products_id,
        (($record->products_price)*(1-(discount / 100 ))),
        expirydate
    );
    if(debugit){echo $updateqry . "<br /><br />\n\n";} else {mysql_query($updateqry);};
};
?>

From an AC (Paraphrased):

MySQL frees up the programmer from having to think about such hard things as transactions that abort because they violate integrity rules or there's a conflict with annother transaction, and it appears faster because commits return before the data is written to disk.

There's an article on Two-factor authentication using pam_usb in the November issue of Linux Journal, and "Source by CC" (formerly Radio Shack in Canada) has rugged 128MB usb flash drives for $20.

The box even lists Linux 2.4 or above in the requirements. Considering the design and size of this USB stick, I think they had twofactor authentication use in mind.

Some time later: Indeed they did! It comes out of the box formatted for two factor authentication use on Windows, write protected and with a crazy non-standard partitioning scheme, including a hidden partition and announcing itself as a 256KB disk. To re-format it and make it not write protected you need a special windows-only program. This was most annoying as I currently have an iBook (MacOS X 10.4), and a flock of Linux machines, but no windows machine.

Narrator: In A.D. 2005, transaction was beginning.

Captain: What happen ?
Programmer: Somebody set up us the MySQL.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's you !!
MySQL: How are you gentlemen !!
MySQL: All your money are belong to user 127.
MySQL: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
MySQL: You have no chance to ACID, make your backup.
MySQL: Ha Ha Ha Ha ....
Operator: Captain !! *
Captain: Take off every Table!!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move Table.
Captain: For great justice.

Right... Around this enterprise, we like strict ACID, Nested queries, Standard SQL syntax and semantics, and 24/7/365 availability. On mature systems, not the latest development release. Without having to carefully choose our table types.

Last night I dreamed that I crashed a wedding just to take pictures.

I get this today:

Slow Down Cowboy!

Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

It's been 9 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment

Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator.



I wonder if it's because I used the word fag (I was saying someone else's comment was biggoted)