[CauseISaidSo]

Repeated from the contest thread, but the sentiment is unchanged: Best wishes to everyone for a healthy and prosperous New Year!

The contests and discussions we’ve had here have certainly been one of life’s little pleasures of the past year.

[CauseISaidSo]

Congrats to aspidites on the individual and combined wins. The Weekly Reports post has been updated with the latest stats.

Best wishes to everyone for a healthy and prosperous New Year!

[CauseISaidSo]

There’s a good deal more dynamic range in RAW than in JPG. In JPG, you’ve got 8 bits per channel (RGB), while RAW stores 10-14 bits (don’t rememeber the exact figure and it varies from camera to camera). That means you can pull more detail out of under- or over-exposed RAW images than JPG images (but of course there’s still a limit).

If you use your camera’s software (Digital Photo Professional for Canon) with RAW images, you can basically post-apply almost any setting in your camera to the image, including white balance, picture style, sharpness, etc, all without actually altering the image (i.e., you can always reset back to SOOC and start again).

Regarding white balance specifically, I do what others have described here – shoot in Auto and then adjust in post if necessary. However there’s a technique that hasn’t been mentioned yet that I believe the pros use – a white balance card. This is a static device (I’ve seen it in the shape of cards or cubes) with calibrated gray color(s) on it that you shoot before the photo session while setting your camera to custom white balance. The camera then adjusts its white balance so that the card is truly gray. I’ve probably got some details wrong there as I’ve never actually used one, but that’s the general idea.

[CauseISaidSo]

Yeah, I’m trying to cull 3 B-sides from a group of about 24. Does that make the alts C-sides and if so, which part of the record was side C? 🙂

[CauseISaidSo]

The only snag I see in combining votes is the effect it will have on historical records. Since we’d effectively be doubling vote capacity, stats like greatest average votes are going to get strongly skewed to current & future participants.

[CauseISaidSo]

FYI, I’ve modified the scraper and database to track Funny votes, but I’m not doing anything with them at the moment (basically, the “ignore Funny votes” option). When we decide what we want to do with them, I’ll go back and apply them appropriately. If it turns out we want to combine Best & Funny, that may cause the results of this and possibly later contests to change; if we go with separate results, that’s a bit of work and it may be a few weeks before I can get to that.

[CauseISaidSo]

Could the scraper just tally all votes cast for an image and combine them into one number?

That’s certainly possible and is one option. My concern if we do that is whether that will put the casuals at more of a disadvantage, since it’s possible that regulars will vote for themselves for both Funny and Best as well as inform their regular followers to do the same, whereas the casuals (both entrants and voters) might not know to do that. Of course, it’s probable that the casual entrants don’t care about the stats or voting results anyway.

I’ve created a poll and discussion thread to get some feedback on this topic.

[CauseISaidSo]

OK, thanks to ennui‘s heads up and sleeping‘s pointing out that current PS contests already have this change, I was able to test the scraper against the new layout and make the required changes. Turned out to be fairly simple. BTW, if anyone sees anything like this coming, I do appreciate a heads up. It keeps me from having to scramble for changes when the contest opens late Wed night.

As it is now (and likely will be for this contest at the very least), votes will only be tallied for the Best voting result. So, one question remains: what do y’all want to do (if anything) about tracking Funny votes?

[CauseISaidSo]

So are those going to be the same options for Farktography contests (smart or funny)? I guess I’m going to have to see it in action first before passing judgement, but I think I’m with loki in that I’m not sure that’s a good thing for us. Either way, I think you’re right, ennui, it looks like a bunch of work to update the scraper and Bibliostats. And I’m heading out Thursday for my team’s bowl game Friday with Sat being NY eve, so if the changes are significant, it may be Sunday after this contest before I can get to them.

I guess I need to solicit input from everyone on how to handle stats now. Any ideas? Assuming smart and funny are the two voting options, do we track separate stats for each vote type, merge the two into some kind of master vote, just ignore funny, or …?

[CauseISaidSo]

Congrats to U-Man on the individual and combined wins. The Weekly Reports post has been updated with the latest stats.

Hope everyone’s Christmas is happy & joyous.

[CauseISaidSo]

Had to skip this one because of work again. At this point, I’m just hoping to get some time before Sleeve-Faced ’cause that one really looks fun, although I should be able to do the B’s next week since they’re already prepped for contests.

Merry Christmas to everyone!

[CauseISaidSo]

Congrats to U-Man on the sweep of both individual and combined. The Weekly Reports post has been updated with the latest stats.

[CauseISaidSo]

While it doesn’t diminish it’s coolness any, the thing to keep in mind about this camera is that it’s not a trillion FPS in the traditional sense. The way I understand it, the shutter doesn’t cycle at a trillion FPS but rather takes a shot with a trillionth-FPS exposure time and then varies the trigger point over each repetition of the event being photographed to build a contiguous-in-space-but-not-time set of images. So the camera only works on events that are exactly repeatable (which they’re ensuring by using a high-precision laser pulse).

[CauseISaidSo]

The HDR version’s actually pretty cool. I’d save that for the next Software Hootenany…

[CauseISaidSo]

Elsinore it has to have been discussed, but the ‘middle finger’ is okay for Fark?

I’m obviously not Els, but I don’t think you can get any more of a blatant bird than Zero‘s entry for Scanner as Camera, so I think you’ll be OK ;):

As for me, I’m still in scramble mode at work trying to meet deadlines, so I’ve gotta skip again. 🙁

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