earl

Have to agree with blackdog, watermarks are a bad trend here. Â It makes for much less pleasant viewing. Â There are websites full of gifted photographers who aren't watermarking... http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/ Â It's like getting an alarm system for your house when all your neighbours leave their front doors open. Â An alarm system that really annoys some of your visitors :-P We had some really severe storms roll through last night. Â We caught only a tiny corner of the system, which ripped up houses and trees across ontario and killed two people who were camping.

Meanwhile, Baghdad crumbles: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2268585_1,00.html -the US no longer responds to the numerous nightly gunbattles between shia and sunni. -about 850K iraqis have fled since the US invasion, and it's very quickly increasing now that it's becoming harder to deny the label "civil war" for the current state in baghdad. -flights to Damascus have gone up from three a week to eight -buses through the sunni triangle into Jordan have gone up from 2 to 40-50 a day. -1600 killed, 2500 wounded in the last six weeks. So the shia-dominated, US-trained, government-equippped security forces are starting to join shia militias in nightly 'death squads' throughout baghdad, executing anyone with a sunni name, while those with enough money are getting the hell out as fast as possible, draining the professionals who were supposed to help rebuild iraq into a functional democracy. As for the latest contestants in the war on terror, the important lesson for Hezbollah is that if you twist Isreal's nipple, they will simply headbutt you. You knew it would happen. Â

You should get the Benaroya Hall 2CD live album. Â It has Man of the Hour and a few other interesting tracks: Masters of War (Dylan) and 25 Minutes to Go (Cash). Â And the Mirkenball single, I always liked the track I Got ID. Â It was released at the same time as Neil Young's Mirrorball, part of the same collaboration. As for Indian music:

Thread for music recommendations: http://www.flashpoint1985.com/cgi-bin....;st=240

I know... history can be so boring. Who suggested doing nothing?? Â We are all talking about "doing something" but I would argue for doing it within the limits of constitutional rights and with regard for the check and balance systems that exist to keep a presidency accountable to the people. Â It seems there are an awful lot of republicans, and even democrats who support the war on terror in the current theatres, but who can't justify some of the methods, and the extent to which the Bush administration is insulating itself from public accountability. How can Congress operate effictively when they are kept in the dark? Â This is current: "I have learned of some alleged intelligence community activities about which our committee has not been briefed. If these allegations are true, they may represent a breach of responsibility by the administration, a violation of the law, and, just as importantly, a direct affront to me and the members of this committee who have so ardently supported efforts to collect information on our enemies. Â [and later...] The U.S. Congress simply should not have to play Twenty Questions to get the information that it deserves under our Constitution." - Representative Peter Hoekstra in the NYTimes. Â They also published a leaked letter to President Bush, four pages: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/package....tra.pdf Have you heard TBA ever mention what the criteria are for having America back "under control"? Â If they won't even tell Congress what they are doing, how will anyone ever know? Â You say you don't believe lawyers, since their job is all about persuasion. Â And so, what about politicians, any important difference there? Â If you believe anything you read about Cheney's "one percent doctrine" then you can easily see that the state of emergency will continue forever. Â So, are you comfortable with the fact that your constitution is on hold, indefinitely?

Food for thought: "A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake," - Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Taylor, June 4, 1798. When will King George and his neoCon cabal run out of steam, and when will real conservatives (small gov't, fiscal reponsibility) take back their party? Another interesting historical perspective: "A person is brought hither in the dungeon of a ship's hold; thence he is vomited into a dungeon on land, loaded with irons, unfurnished with money, unsupported by friends, three thousand miles from all means of calling upon or confronting evidence, where no one local circumstance that tends to detect perjury can possibly be judged of; such a person may be executed according to form, but he can never be tried according to justice. I therefore could never reconcile myself to the bill I send you, which is expressly provided to remove all inconveniences from the establishment of a mode of trial which has ever appeared to me most unjust and most unconstitutional. Far from removing the difficulties which impede the execution of so mischievous a project, I would heap new difficulties upon it, if it were in my power. All the ancient, honest, juridical principles and institutions of England are so many clogs to check and retard the headlong course of violence and oppression. They were invented for this one good purpose, that what was not just should not be convenient. Convinced of this, I would leave things as I found them. The old, cool-headed, general law is as good as any deviation dictated by present heat," - Edmund Burke, arguing that American prisoners should retain the right to due process and fair trial in England. It makes sense to expand executive powers during an emergency, but what happens when the Chief Executive declares what amounts to permanent emergency? Â Where is the check and balance when King George can place himself and his people above the law, indefinitely? It starts to look less like democracy and more like something else, when all the king's horses and all the king's men are busy finding ways around the constitution.

quote of the day: "Kim Jong-Il may have just committed his own geostrategic version of premature ejaculation with a drooping Nodong." ~Andrew Sullivan

Looked like a nice clean launch. And happy independence day!

Canadian indie band of goodness = The Arcade Fire... Apostle of Hustle is my favourite of the BSS satellites -- a large number of them (BSS, Collett, Metric, Feist) will be playing at the Ottawa bluesfest next week. Â But Belle Orchestre and Seu Jorge are the two shows I don't want to miss. Today I discovered Smog. Â I'm listening to the newest album "A River Ain't Too Much To Love", and I see that I have a large discography backlog to discover.

Helping to babysit my brother's dog, who just had the business end of his femur excised. Â There wasn't enough bone left to anchor a hip replacement, and they weren't willing to go with the high impulse lead treatment. He fell out of a moving pickup truck when he was a puppy and the owner gave him up. Â They got him from the pound, had a gimp front leg fixed up, but soon discovered more serious problems in the hip joint (fractured, followed by abnormal reattachment). He's well sedated and pretty mellow, but wasn't really happy when we put the lampshade on his head. Â He's going to have to deal with being a radar station for the next few weeks. This is the Canon f1.8 50mm. Â My sigma can't open up enough to get this kind of indoor shot of a moving target. Deadmeat, nice campus, but if there's a weakness, it's that the shots come across like tourist snapshots. Â When you are more familiar with the camera, try more unusual shots that pick out interesting details. Â Wait for a different time of day that casts more striking sunlight, or try a tripod mounted long exposure to add something a bit surreal. The sky, like you mentioned, is overcast and becomes too bright, lots of areas are blown out. Â You can also think about getting a circular polarizing filter, I'm happy with mine. Â On a mostly clear day, it darkens a blue sky a lot, popping out the clouds. Also, look into hacking your camera :-) Â Canon blocked out a number of features in the 300D since it uses the same technology as the 10D which was also out at the same time with the full feature set. Â Look up the 300D firmware hack. Â Did I just break some forum rules?

Very nice colours, I prefer them rather than the more 'plastic' colors of for example this one. I like the vibrant colours of the photo you just used as an example... More my style I think they are both perfect for the telling of this story. The first is when you are drunk and having a great time with your friends on a beautiful summer day... the sunset is somewhat hazy, but still beautiful. Eventually you wake up in a field somewhere with a terrible hangover, harsh and unfriendly morning light, plus the feeling that something is not quite right.

A few from the war museum, nothing too photographically spectacular -- the vast majority aren't much to look at. Â I was mostly just seeing what they had in stock and adding a bit to my ref collection. Â If you keep a low profile, you can sneak around to the back of the BMP1 when nobody is looking (edit: where crew doors are open, and most of the kit is still packed in there). Â There's some camo netting suggesting that you aren't supposed to go around there, but the staff was busy cleaning up after a conference on the gallery floor. It was sort of nice seeing some of these small arms in person, despite being all to familar with them from photo reference. Â Too bad there was no PK.

Ahh I recently purchased this fine piece of equipment. Got a BGE-2 battery pack, SIGMA 28-300 lens, 256 CF card, 3 batteries, 2 chargers, multi-card reader, nice and useful carry case all for 1000€  It's worth saving up for good equipment later than spending money on mediocre equipment immediately  I think you'll find 256mb gets filled up pretty quickly, you might want another one of those.  I have 1GB and it gets crowded some days if I'm shooting RAW and I'm out for a full day.  For lenses, I've found the Canon 50mm f1.8 is a really great accessory - it's cheap and made of plastic, but the glass is good.  I got it because it's very light and portable, and is very fast compared to my Sigma 18-200mm.  Extemely tight DOF is good for portraits, and fast -- good in certain low light situations.  The fixed 50mm can get pretty tight on an APS-C sensor. I was looking at the Peleng 8mm fisheye (made in Belarus, in true soviet fashion -- cheap and simple).  Unfortunately it can't project a full circle onto APS-C sized sensors, so I'm sort of wishing I had a 5D.  I think it's just my new target for wasting money... I hardly use the camera enough to justify spending any more money on it.  If I was to spread the cost across every good photo I've taken... I think I'm still paying about $300 per photo :-P And: a view of ottawa from the quebec side.  i live a block or two behind that glass tower at the end of the bridge. http://www.baconbomb.com/img/panodrama.jpg @itseme, nice pics! Reminds me of a place where i used to work. It was always foggy in the morning, and I always working very early so I saw a lot of great sunrises... these days I'm more likely to see a sunrise out the window as I'm going to sleep

Black Angels sound great, has a bit (a lot) of Frank Black in those vocals. There's definitely resurgent rock-reaction to put all the wastrel bespectacled indie rockers back in their place :-) Check out http://www.wolfmother.com/ and http://www.wolfmother.ca with some alternate steaming tracks (they're actually australian). It's like led zeppelin to the fourth power of black sabbath with a bit of Doors keyboard noodling for good measure. So while it's all very derivative with little attempt at reinventing anything, it still rocks and make me want to buy an airbrushed van with no windows and a case of stubbies. Otherwise, some stuff that I've wanted to listen to more but haven't heard too much from (should be some free mp3s at each link) -Gogol Bordello http://www.gogolbordello.com/ -Beirut / Gulag Orkestar http://www.beirutband.com/ -Martin Dosh http://www.doshfamily.com/

I probably wouldn't notice it if everbody would stop mentioning that it's christian music. Â I guess because the songs are written less less like "christianity; why i'm compelled to sing about it, and why you need it too" and more like "stories from my life and stuff that's important to me". Â So it's pretty palatable to non-christians like myself. Â It's just a perfectly arranged low-key pop/folk album. Â That description might sound horrible, try it. Â But it sits in my collection next to Modest Mouse, and Brock is pretty cynical and often nihilistic in his lyrics (which I can't get enough of). Â I think I have every last bit of recorded music from them as of yesterday (the fruit that ate itself). Destroyer can be heard here, listen to the first three songs at least, the rest vary a lot in listenability (the album Your Blues was a MIDI experiment, bleagh!) Â But he plays a lot with phrasing and it works for me, and his lyrics are great. http://www.mergerecords.com/band.php?media=true&band_id=29

Thanks for the tip, I just picked it up. Â It's pretty standard Gomez on first listen, they didn't really stress themselves by trying anything too new. Â Abandoned Shopping Trolley Hotline remains my favourite album. Also listening to: Destroyer - Destroyers Rubies Sufjan Stevens - Come on feel the Illinoise Sufjan Stevens - Seven Swans (holy banjo!)

fixed... I was sold the first time I heard them, which was when I saw the video for Sober.

I hope Celine Dion will be in this.

Okay, I see what you mean. The ease of editing makes people lazy when shooting. That's when photoshop starts to be used as a crutch instead of an important final stage. It's important to pay attention to mistakes, and turn them into useful feedback at the next photo shoot (even if photoshop lets people minimize the mistakes). I definitely have this problem.

Okay, i'll bite :-) Â You would use in-camera processing, but not photoshop? Â It's all software processing either way. Â It just means you are leaving the adjustments up to someone else, who coded the prefab processes: whitebalance, sharpening, colour profiles, etc. Â If you shoot RAW, you get exactly what the CCD recorded, and then you can do it all yourself instead of relying on simplified internal presets. Â It gives you the chance to add a bit more personal vision to the image. And for some general semantics; I say 'reality' is altered as soon as it is recorded - film type or CCD quality, lens distortion, flare, shutter speed, DOF... down to the context of where people see your images. Â The only difference is that photoshop offers so much more control that the inexperienced (i include myself here) can make things ugly really quickly. I admire this guy's work: http://www.markscholey.co.uk/landscapes/landscapes.htm And which reality do you prefer: http://www.pbase.com/hiv/ps_skillz

Where is the fun of digital photography without post processing? Â x-ray pasta: On a side note, George Smith and Willard Boyle, the scientists who invented the CCD in 1969 were recently awarded the Draper Prize. It was in the news here because Boyle is Canadian. http://www.shortcourses.com/pixels/sensors/boyleandsmith.jpg

I didn't notice this part where you asked for advice until now. Â Your drawings have good form/shape, but the shading can improve a lot. Â The most simple guidelines to to pay attention to values - use black where it needs to be and white where it needs to be and all the range in between. Â If you don't pay enough attention to this, your images will lack life. Â For example - this is a great start but it only the very beginning: http://img112.imageshack.us/img112/482/sken0092uf.th.jpg Some basic tips for painting in photoshop: -keep linework on a different layer so you can hide/adjust it seperately from your painting layers -start shading by blocking in big areas of shadow, midtone and hightlight. Â This is very general and doesn't need any details and even doesn't need to follow linework too carefully yet. Â After this part your image should have it's general feel, and everything else is just refinement. -work in stages of detail across the whole image, don't finish one corner before the rest of the image -use a hard round brush with pressure sensitive opacity, instead of size. Â in standard ps brushes, you will find three of these brushes after the first two big groups of brushes. I tried painting over your image as an example, but i made a bit of a mess, and changed it (a lot) from the original drawing. Â Anyway, it's an example of trying to use a full range of values from near-black to near-white. Â This is the only section that turned out okay.. even if the eyes are a bit mismatched. I started doing some digital painting recently, I haven't done any plain 2D art for ages. Â Here's an example of process and final, but still a bit rough. Â Just an exercise from photo reference. Â The idea that helped me a lot recently is that every surface is a mirror, just with different levels of roughness, reflecting efficiency, distortion, colour cast, etc. Also thanks for suggestion about the Czech animation, I like this kind of stuff and there is a place here that will probably have it for rent. Â I recently watched Jan Svankmajer's slightly nightmarish "Neco Z Alenky". Â Stopmotion is great. Â Someone suggested to me "Pojd'te Pane, Budeme Si Hrat", a really nice looking children's animation: http://img.bhe.templation.cz/data....t_1.gif

To reduce purple fringing: -use lower ISO's when possible -don't use digital zoom (evar! ) -some addon lenses increase it (cheap teleconverters) But in the end I think comes from the hardware - some digital cameras are worse than others. Â There isn't much you can do to avoid it, but you can correct it. Â If you use photoshop, try PFree: http://www.sd3.info/pf828/PFree/PFree0-1.html Before: http://www.sd3.info/pf828/PFree/hollyBefore.jpg After: http://www.sd3.info/pf828/PFree/hollyDefault.jpg

Hellfish, I guess you will probably want a simple APS rather than an SLR, even with their exit from the current market a good film SLRs is still relatively expensive. Â You could get a clunker manual focus SLR for pretty cheap - the least battery dependent camera you can find, but manual focus and exposure settings means you could lose some nice chances to take a photo when speed counts. For a good compact film camera, have a look into the Canon Sure Shot series like 130, 150 or Z180. Get something with 3x zoom or better. Haven't used one, but it's hard to go wrong with canon, and you should be able to find one for pretty cheap these days. I wouldn't want to pay more than $50 US for one.

Nice photo goob! Â I've been really lazy about photography lately, but I haven't really been out anywhere interesting. Here's a few from "winterlude" even though the weather here sucks and it's much like a proper winter at all. Â I'd love to have a dependable -11 and some of new york's snow. Â Instead it keeps rising above freezing and making a mess. http://www.baconbomb.com/photos/winterlude/01.jpg http://www.baconbomb.com/photos/winterlude/05.jpg Interestingly, the "eternal flame" in front of parliament was out, and the area smelled like raw natural gas, so I didn't stick around.