earl

verbal, nice work, but the final images should be smaller, they would look MUCH nicer at half that size or smaller, like 500px wide. supah! wow! i would go crazy trying to make that much detail. Especially that nozzle, I really really like how you made it look "heat-stained" with the blue rings. Nice touch.

edit: supah beat me to it and bumped me to a new page. Â ironsight - offset the subject to make the whole scene a bit more interesting: http://www.silverlight.co.uk/tutorials/compose_expose/thirds.html iNeo - awesome photos! Â I had no idea that place existed, very interesting place (and history).

 /uninstalling Lockdown after 5 minutes. It makes me sad to see a series go downhill this way.  Rogue Spear / Urban Ops was the first great tactical game that I played, and if I had it installed I could still happily play Estate daily - speed runs, shotgun frenzies, pistols only, back stairs, front window.  I still can't put my finger on it exactly, but there was something in it - environments, movements, FOV, I don't know - that gave it a certain feeling of precision and control.  I haven't seen a worthy substitute since. It was also where I learned about modifying game content: http://www.baconbomb.com/modworks/img/spetsnazweapons_poster.jpg

Painted up like a bad-guy: Next, a good reason why Conservatives suck! Â Throw away an expensive but fantastically capable aircraft that would have rocked the world, and instead buy expensive and fantastically inadequate american rockets and then refuse to arm them with the nuclear warheads they need to work properly. Â This is the biggest piece that's left of the CF-105, or Avro Arrow. The Bomarc missile is visible in the background.

 Indeed, he is my favorite drummer. His drumming on the song When the Levee Breaks Bron-Y-aur Stomp. It's just a simple repeated THUMP, Black Country Woman has the same thing at 1:33 to 2:10. Boogie with Stu add: Poor Tom Good Times Bad Times Moby Dick Bonzo's Montreux The Girl I Love... (BBC sessions) edit\ i'm due for a zeppelathon... box set 1 & 2, bbc sessions + how the west was won = 12 hours.

I've been playing around with white balance and colour balance in Photoshop. Â It was a classic campfire scene, but after I shifted midtones and highlights away from yellow and red, the usual daytime colours popped out. Â I like it a lot less today than when I created it. Â Levels are also adjusted, the original was underexposed. Â Original: original photo (resized) It's resized, but was 30sec exposure, ISO100, f3.5. Â I should have closed the shutter to 8 or more, because the camera can't get focus in these conditions, even with the flash assist, so it was manual (guesswork). Â I can't tell what's DOF blur and what's camera shake.

Whoa, lots of good photos in the last week. Â Hotshot, I like your last (dark fence and trees framing the field). Ironsight, I really like this one - http://img498.imageshack.us/img498/5344/bos59ij.th.jpg - except for the sky and the really strong 'sharpening'. Â I hope you don't mind, but I tried something with it.. dunno if it's any better but i love those sunbeams: And some of my own:

Vancouver's weather forecast: December: 6 degrees and raining January: 6 degrees and raining February: 7 degrees and raining March: 8 degrees and 1% chance of seeing the sun. I don't hate it, but I'm not missing it. I'll prefer a winter of -20 and clear blue skies any day. Now if we can just get 1m of snow... Nice work with Dose, you're famous! Hundreds of people will be soaking up spilled coffee with it!

My new view, 07:30, -21C and 0km wind:

For me, the story is 99% funny and 1% tragic. But I think there is still a line, however blurry or faded for some people, between killing something to eat it and killing something for: -saving a bunch of dominoes -selling its pelt/tusks/paws/gall bladder/penis -target practice -curiosity about terminal ballistics. But speaking of PETA and off-the-deep-end-bleeding-heart-activists, has anyone seen the documentary Grizzly Man by Werner Hertzog? If not, I highly recommend it. Again, it's funny/tragic.

DBR_ONIX, Can you compare eating an animal for sustenance with killing for entertainment, pleasure, or for a trite world record? Â This particular story doesn't bother me much at all, but your argument is weak. I think you will find a lot of people can eat animals and be opposed to senseless killing without being hypocritical.

This is just plain cool. Check out the video. Variable DOF, taken during one exposure and stored for adjusting later. Â Lightfield Camera

Tovarish - you desk is classic, but I really liked this: http://img474.imageshack.us/img474/7425/nov1125jo.jpg Gagamel, the road is my favourite. GoOB, 3 of 4 pics have really burned out highlights (skies & lake surface). Â Is this on the original photo or done in an image editor? Â I like the pics, but I would try to avoid burnouts like the plague. Here's a few experiments, reflections from a granite surface + much post processing. Â Upside down is actually 'right side up' and I couldn't decide which I liked better. When it's upside down it's easier to forget the objects and just look at the shapes.

I like the bee. And GoOB's 3rd photo is great, that border colour works really well too. These little dinners arrive on my doorstep this morning. Â Too bad the neighbours are all too close by. Â They walked away unscathed. Â Just snapshots, shot through glass so they were a bit soft and needed some adjusted levels. Supah/killagee, I have a 350D + Sigma 18-200mm and the cheapest IR remote control. Â I wanted the cable control, but it was 3x more expensive! Â When the shutter speed is set to bulb, the first press opens the shutter and the next closes it, so there's no need for a lock. Because of the city haze, there's too much light at night. Â That's why there isn't a lot of contrast. Â That middle photo was taken with ISO200, 16min, f14. Â I thought a smaller aperture would help to keep the foreground/landscape sharper, and the light levels seemed to warrant it.

Nice pictures guys. Played with some long night sky exposures, trying to find what works. Once I have an idea what I'm doing, then I might try a more interesting locaiton.

Wow! Â Very nice, that set is like something from National Geographic. Â I don't have time try and figure out which species (though I'd like to). Â It's most likely a solitary wasp (not living in social groups) which has just stung the larva and layed an egg on it. Â It was probably trying to bury the larva as a food source for its offspring. From some text about the cicada killer wasp, it lives in southern USA:

Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by technical quality. In these pictures, the photographer obviously wanted to make them technically imperfect by traditional standards. But traditional standards are boring, and in my opinion so are those who like to enforce them. The exciting part of photography is creating something outside of your boundaries, and outside other people's boundaries aswell. It's art. Granted, what you define as art might be a macro shot of your new lens, your girlfriends watch or maybe your friends record collection, instead of something that tries to convey an emotion, or ask a question. Preferrably emotions other than: "Wow, that lens looks REALLY cool when I fiddle about with the whitebalanance and overexpose the shot a little!" And if you look at those pictures Iv'e posted in the right context (IE in the Photojournal they are taken from) you might understand them. On their own though, as you so eloquently pointed out, they really are quite meaningless. But still perfect examples of what I aspire to do when I take photographs, and what I want to do after I finish my education. First, I don't mean to sound like some elitist pro, i'm just a half-ass enthusiast. Â Second, art is subjective, there's no sense trying to tell somebody else what is and isn't art. Â You like it or you don't, and they like it or they don't. Claiming 'artistic style' to excuse lack of effort or lack of technical knowledge is just a cop out. Â And yet the most random snapshot sometimes results in the best photos. If I look back at iNeo's photos (that's how this began?) most are actually not too blurred, it's only that first one that I think would look better if the trees weren't blurred from camera shake. Â The whole set gives a feeling of snapshots taken on the way towards something more important, which is why I made my comment. Â I think the whole set would look pretty sharp in B&W. Here's something I saw today (not mine) that I really like, and you can't claim it's technically perfect: Â http://www.mrcury.com/photography/film/TMZ3200A_34A.jpg

Were you flying? Are you Superman? Was there just a really tall building you can go up into? Or was there a hill over looking it? A "hill" yes. The topography around Vancouver is pretty intense. Grouse mountain is one of three ski hills directly north of Vancouver's downtown, only about 45min away. I'm not sure what the elevation difference is, but here is a wider pic from a similar viewpoint: http://members.aol.com/rashwo3443/grouse1.jpg The downtown core that you see in my photo is just to the right of the red part of the tower in this image. It was really cloudy that's why I had to abuse the levels in my pic and it looks all grainy. The inverse view: http://photos.beckettmw.com/albums/vancouver2005/aco.sized.jpg BlackSkorpion, I have to go there one day as well. My great grandfather came from Karstula (?) area which I think is relatively close to Tampere (north east?). The forest photo is amazing.

Northern Ontario: I'm a little disappointed with the Sigma 18-200mm lens, or probably my expectations were just too high. It seems like I'm always fighting camera-shake even at normal focal distances. I expected to be able to take hand-held shots more easily even in overcast conditions, without having to use high ISO values to get good shutter speeds. Or I just have to stop drinking so much coffee.

ineo, those are nice pics, but use a tripod or stable surface and they would be way better. Killagee, the first & second look like triliums, but you aren't in eastern Canada and it's not spring here, so... Whiteflies... I used to work in a tomato greenhouse, and at the end of each season is a lovely whitefly pandemic. Â We used biocontrols, tiny parasitic wasps called Encarsia formosa and also Eretmocerus californicus. Â We always used yellow sticky traps for population monitoring, but when it gets really bad, lots of yellow sticky cards/tape can be used for control. Â The adult flies will be attracted to anything yellow, so you can shake the plant and they will fly to the card, stick, and die. Â Hopefully before they lay more eggs. Â Before I started working there, it was so bad that pickers had to wear respirators and the last-ditch control method was a vaccuum cleaner. Vancouver's north shore mountains:

100 to 50 ISO is just one stop. Â You can always get a neutral density filter cut the light down a few stops before it enters the lens. I'm going to try some long night exposures soon, I got the RC1 remote shutter control for that purpose.

First I was like  then I was like  and now I'm like  It's not even comparable to my C3000 - I'm stoked to see such a huge difference, totally justifies the purchase.  No sky burnouts on a normal day, no more purple fringing, no autofocus issues, easy manual settings, way way faster reading and writing to memory, huge capacity even with RAW (2GB) and instant startup time.