Not a special effect:
[click for full size.]
It’s an aircraft, possibly a Predator, moving through a sandstorm.
Discussion and other cool photos of the “Kopp-Etchells Effect” here.
Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category
Ghost Ship
Friday, November 6th, 2009A Word of Advice, Howard
Thursday, October 1st, 2009They’ll yield faster on Lover’s Lane if you learn to undo the clasps in back.
Yield Sign at Howard Lane and Bralick Way
[Second in my series of cheap double-entendre road sign photos. Yes, I understand I am perpetrating jokes which have been told by every freshman high school boy in town since these signs were, ahem, erected. And, yes, the sign really does say "Howard Lane". I'll take a better picture on the next sunny day. I wonder if the drivers going by as I point my camera shake their heads at my obvious newbiehood.]
Hustlin’ and Bustlin’
Sunday, September 27th, 2009
Intersection of Logtown and Cream City, Wisconsin.
[Note: Not associated with Milwaukee, which is far, far away. There are actually are a few buildings in this Cream City.]
Uppity Jews
Thursday, June 11th, 2009You know, if those damn Jews would just take a clue from the peace loving Palestinians whose land they’re squatting on and start blowing themselves up in markets and pizza parlors to make their points, we’d take them a lot more seriously.
I mean, how dare they demand that their countrymen take their stupid religious ideas seriously?
Ultra-orthodox Jews clash with police.
(Oh, and those ridiculous fur hats! They should try turbans or table cloths, much more civilized.)
Remember, folks: This is taking place in Israel, where Judaism is the official state religion. It makes perfect sense to me that Jews should be able to impose their religious restrictions on public life there. Wouldn’t like to see it here, mind. But I live in a country where state religions are specifically prohibited.
One last thought:
Something’s nagging me about the photos on the original site. For some reason, most of them look static, staged, particularly the ones with protesters and cops. All very well posed, very well lit, good color, very clean.
I am not an expert, I could well be wrong. It may just be that the photographer was very, very good.
I hope I’m wrong. If these did turn out to be fake, it would hurt the Israeli cause far worse than worse fakes hurt the Muslims.
Da Vinci’s Face
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009Via Ghost of a Flea, another great TED talk, less than five minutes, on the search for self-portraits of Leonardo da Vinci.
It’s just amazing what turns up when you search even a small database using a few simple rules.
More faces from The Flea: “The Land of No Smiles”, North Korea. A set of haunting, surreptitious photographs.
Product Review: Sylvania Super Saver CFL Bug Light
Thursday, March 5th, 2009Now with Cheezo-Scan Spectroscopy!
So, the big question is, does the Sylvania CF13EL/SUPER/YELLOW bug light actually do better at not attracting bugs than a regular incandescent bug light, such as the Phillips BUG-A-AWAY?
Beats me; it’s a bit chill tonight, and the bugs aren’t really out.
BUT!
We got cool piccies!
Ah? Ah? Cool, right?
I held my very scientific pair of diffraction grating goggles in front of my camera lens, took a few snaps of each bulb in action, cut and pasted in The GIMP, and voila!
I made this image by selecting one rainbow image from photos of each lamp, editing them to be the same size & resolution, and then pasting them together, centering the yellow image from the CFL as closely as I could on the same color band in the continuous spectrum of the incandescent.
The CFL, which looks very yellow to your eyes, is actually radiating very strongly in red and green, and only faintly in yellow/orange. The incandescent, on the other hand, is radiating all the way across the visible spectrum.
(If I were being very, very scientific, I would have arranged a thin slit to photograph the bulbs through; then I would have had single thin lines at each wavelength instead of three wide copies of the CFL itself. By measuring the locations of those lines, I would be able to tell you the wavelengths of the emitted light. Ah, well. Another time, perhaps.)
It’s easy to think that the CFL will be most effective.
In fact, it’s hard to tell from this: bugs are attracted to ultraviolet, which my camera does not pick up. Fluorescent lamps use UV to stimulate phosphors coating the inside of the tube. Most FLs have a mixture of phosphors to generate a mix of wavelengths to simulate white light, so the lamp may actually be radiating in the UV, and I just can’t see it or detect it with my equipment.
However, the lamp has a heavy yellow coating, and yellow is the most efficient color for filtering out UV; since the lamp generates almost no yellow light, the coating is either there as a UV filter, or is pure marketing.
Here’s the lamp itself; note the see-through base; see-through is always a plus for this curious monkey. There’s a number on it which may well be the model number or a lot number: 0835200.
[Update: Further model identification info: the blister pack insert has the number "X15283" over the UL logo, and the bar code bears the legend "CF13EL/MINI/BUG/BL".]
I’m curious that Sylvania didn’t use an actual yellow phosphor. It may be that no strong, attractive yellow phosphor was available, or that it is prohibitively expensive.
I’d also like to see an LED bug light; LEDs actually do radiate only yellow or orange light, with, as far as I know, almost no UV. Unfortunately, they’re very expensive: about $40 for the linked model, and that lamp would not fit in my fixture.
Let me also note that this lamp turns on almost instantly with a good fraction of its full power.
In researching this article, I found exactly one other post reviewing bug-performance of CFLs. Taft found that his was reasonably effective; I look forward to seeing how mine does compared to the incandescent. Warm nights should be coming soon.
Linky Links
Monday, February 16th, 2009My Ubuntu system has crashed, and I can’t be arsed at the moment to fix it, so I’m running off a bootable live CD (from Hudson and Hudson’s Ubuntu 7.10 Linux: Unleashed.) That means I’m not logged in with my usual permissions. So, all the stuff I want to put in my bookmarks are going here.
Science and Technology in service to Beauty: 101 Absolutely Breathtaking Infrared Photographs.
Boat on a lake with IR photography
Most of these seem to combine IR with visible light; whether this is done in the camera or computer I don’t know. There’s a series of links to tutorials after the gallery; I’ll check that out when I have time.
FDR’s New Deal made things worse, not better. Via Transterrestrial Musings.
The New Deal prolonged the Great Depression because of not one but a combination of misguided policies that made it harder for employers to create jobs and harder for consumers to buy things. Keynesian commentators talk as if FDR made a single key mistake, like not incurring big enough budget deficits. This ignores the tripling of the tax burden during the New Deal period (1933-1940). Also ignored is the fact that New Deal spending was mainly paid for by the middle class and the poor, because the biggest revenue generator for the federal government was the excise tax on beer, cigarettes, chewing gum, and other cheap pleasures disproportionately enjoyed by the middle class and the poor. Moreover, several New Deal laws made everything — especially food — more expensive when Americans desperately needed bargains.
The New Deal certainly did do some enduring good works. However, those are completely overshadowed by the horribly misguided mangling of the marketplace in the short term, and the lasting damage to our political system in the long term.
[post will be updated as I find new stuff.]
Practical Optics
Monday, December 15th, 2008If you own a camera and like to pretend you can take pictures with it, like me, Derek K. Miller’s Penmachine looks to be an excellent resource for learning how to actually use that very expensive tool.
Esthetics from technology; I love it.
Here’s an excellent sample: using the ISO setting to achieve intermediate f-stop values:
In the old days of film, photographers used to think in terms of two variables: shutter speed and aperture. That’s because the third one, sensitivity or ISO (also known previously as ASA), was fixed for each roll of film. You had an ISO 400 roll, or an ISO 64 roll, or a high-speed ISO 1000 roll, but that was it until you changed the film.
In the digital age, we now have that third variable, because we can adjust the ISO as much as we want, or even have the camera adjust it automatically for changing lighting conditions, so that each picture can use its own ISO setting, as well as its own aperture and shutter speed.
Snow in Houston, Texas
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
Cars in a dealership parking lot covered with snow
I was not the only one taking this picture or its like; I saw cars stopped on the highway photographing dealer lots with what looked like pro-gear.
The snow on the highway overpasses were beginning to cover even the traffic paths. I passed one accident, saw one car who looked as if he might have just barely avoided hitting the barrier barrels in the crotch of a wye, and there was a whole lane of stopped cars that may well have been due to an accident. Iwas OK, but for a while, I was being followed by some idiot who hugged my tail by a carlength or less, at freeway speeds, although I kept flashing my brake lights trying to get him to back off. No go. Made it home alright, though.
Instant
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008Every day, from 31 March 1979 through 25 October 1997, Jamie Livingstone took a Polaroid instant photo of himself, his family, his friends, or his world.
It’s an extraordinary collection, now available on the Photo of the Day website.
Chris Higgins told the story on Mental Floss.
Higgins also linked to an lovely little film by Charles and Ray Eames detailing the technology underlying the project, the Polaroid SX-70 instant camera. The SX-70 first enabled many of the uses that digital cameras now find. That camera was also a hacker’s dream, which could be cannibalized for at least two crucial technologies: The flat battery pack, and the sonar range finder. (That last is still a mainstay of many robotic navigation and detection systems.)
You may know the Eames by their chairs, or by another of their films, Powers of Ten.
Speaking of digital photography, don’t miss this discussion of how current high-end professional digital cameras, especially the Nikon D3x, are being marketed. It’s a bit over my head (I’m only getting maybe a third of the discussion points), but I believe it’s worthwhile for anyone considering the purchase of anything other than the most basic point-and-shoots. [Via Cold Fury.]