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Mike Cohen The D40 or D40x’s sport mode isn’t only for sports. It’s great for any time you want to capture fast action at the highest possible shutter speed. Using continuous shooting mode you can capture action at 1/500 or 1/1000 second shutter speed. I was able to capture this Polynesian dancer’s torch in midair.
Today was Oakland Park’s Youth Day, one of our biggest events. I took over 2000 photos, which I’m still processing. I used the sport mode of the D40x and did lots of burst mode shooting of Brazilian Capoeira, Polynesian dancing, and martial arts events. Here’s the best shot I found so far. I managed to catch this guy in midair during a Capoeira demonstration. I’ll upload more photos when I finish sorting & processing them.
Aperture 2.1 had no problem handling that many photos in a single project. It took about 5 minutes to import from the memory card.
Just as I suspected, a Microsoft executive admitted that Vista’s UAC (User Account Control) is designed to annoy users.
In a Thursday presentation at RSA 2008 in San Francisco, David Cross, a product unit manager at Microsoft who was part of the team that developed UAC, admitted that Microsoft’s strategy with UAC was to irritate users and ISVs in order to get them to change their behavior.
“The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I’m serious,” said Cross.
Microsoft not only wanted to get users to stop running as administrators, which exacerbates the effects of attacks, but also wanted to convince ISVs to stop building applications that require administrative privileges to install and run, Cross explained.
“We needed to change the ecosystem, and we needed a heavy hammer to do it,” Cross said.
Most likely it actually makes the system less secure since most people I know turn off UAC. Anyone who doesn’t turn it off soon gets so used to clicking ‘yes’ that they don’t even bother to read the alert and just respond automatically, so when it’s caused by real malware they won’t realize the difference.
You’ve probably seen photos where most of it is black & white with one bit colorized. If you have a photo with a strong contrast between subject and background, it’s pretty easy to do in Photoshop.
Earlier today I took this picture of roses blooming in my neighbor’s garden. I used the largest aperture for my lens (F5.6) to bring out the subject and blur the background slightly.
Since there was a pretty strong contrast between the flowers and the background, it was pretty easy to use Photoshop’s color range selection tool to select the flowers only. I then inverted the selection and made an adjustment layer based on the selection. In the adjustment layer, I used hue/saturation to desaturate it and darken it slightly.
Here’s the final result.
Via Engadget:
a bill expected to be introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives demands that the U.S. Secretary of Transportation initiate a study to determine if a minimum sound level is in fact needed and, if so, require that automakers comply with it (possibly as early as 2010).
As AutoWeek reports, the bill was apparently prompted by concerns that hybrid and electric vehicles are a little too quiet, and pose a risk to pedestrians, especially the blind.
I hope this idea dies quickly. My favorite thing about the Prius is the smooth and quiet ride. If this ever becomes law, I will disable the noise maker if my next hybrid or electric car is forced to have one.
Checking my Akismet queue, I found several trackbacks from spam blogs scraping and reposting my content. They all seem to be using the same template, usually starting with “(some blog name) wrote an interesting post today…”, always giving it some random name linked to my blog.
I don’t mind my feed being included in an aggregator, but this is pure content theft.
Fascinating story found at Flickr (Mundo Uno Photo Pool):
Hessy Levinsons was born in 1934. When she was six months old, Hessy was taken to a leading Berlin photographer to have her portrait taken. A few months later this picture appeared on the cover of the Nazi publication, "Sonne ins Haus" [Sun in the House]. Frightened by the possible consequences of their exposure as foreign-born Jews, Hessy’s mother rushed to the photographer. He explained that he had known she was a Jewish child and had deliberately submitted her photograph to a contest for the most beautiful Aryan baby in order to ridicule Nazi racial theory, and Hessy was selected as winner of the contest among all the German babies.
Several months later an aunt in Memel recognized Hessy’s portrait on a picture postcard in a local store and sent it to the Levinsons in Berlin. The card was captioned "Best wishes for the birthday." After the publication of her photograph Hessy was kept largely at home lest she be recognized in the street and her parents questioned about her identity.
In 1936 her father was arrested by the Gestapo on a trumped-up tax charge. He was released only after his accountant, a Nazi party member, came to his defense. Following this incident the Levinsons left for Latvia, where they remained for a year until deciding to move to Paris in 1938. The family had fully reestablished itself when the Germans entered Paris. Her father Jacob applied for American visas but had no way of knowing when they might come through. In 1941, when the round-up of foreign Jews began in Paris, the Levinsons fled to Memac-sur-Mer, a coastal town near Bordeaux. From there they were led by members of the French resistance to Nice.
In the meantime Jacob received notice that their American visas had arrived, but that only 45 days remained to get to the U.S. before the visas would expire. Unable to find immediate transport to the United States, Jacob applied for an extension of their U.S. visas. The U.S. Department of Immigration denied these extensions.
Jacob then secured Cuban visas for the family and booked passage on the Serpa Pinto, a Portuguese ship that left from Lisbon in early in 1942 for Havana. The family spent the next seven years in the Cuban capital, where Hessy and her sister grew up. In 1948 the Levinsons reapplied for immigration to the U.S. and arrived in New York in 1949.
Baby picture of Hessy Levinsons, the Jewish winner of the most beautiful Aryan baby contest, published on the cover of the German publication, "Sonne ins Haus: Illustrierte Familienzeitschrift mit Versicherung."
Photo posted by michelleSoeMoe, courtesy of www.ushmm.org.
As you probably know, Flickr introduced their video feature earlier this week. Unfortunately their effort is half-assed and only detracts from the site. They only allow videos of 90 seconds or less, which isn’t really useful. It’s obviously meant for the short videos you can take with many point-and-shoot cameras or cell phones, but there are plenty of other sites which do it much better.
Flickr can already be slow at times, and I’m afraid they won’t have the bandwidth to support video without making it even slower. They should keep doing what they excel at, which is being the best photo sharing site, and not try to do something where their effort is only mediocre.
There’s already a no video group and petitions. While most Flickr petitions have been pretty stupid, this is one I agree with.
I really like the aged photo effect you can create at this Japanese website, so I attempted to duplicate the effect in Photoshop. These pictures I took in San Francisco last year seemed to be a good subject.
For my first attempt, I used the Aperture 2.1’s sepia tone & vignette effects and then used Photoshop’s film grain filter. The result was a little too bright and didn’t really look aged enough.
Finally, I got an effect I really like with a few Photoshop actions. I used the Sepia Tone Grayscale action, the Spatter Frame action, and the add noise filter.
Here’s the original version of the second photo.
