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The link when live on the main page earlier than normal this week (for obvious reasons!) so it might confuse people. Also, since it’s New Year’s Eve, voting will almost certainly be light anyway. So we’ll have to wait for the hang-over voters tomorrow. 🙂

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Good point! So far I’ve been lucky, but might try contest “69” again if I get burned by the link checker or a big file.

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Does everybody know about the Fark Scratchpad that lets you preview your posts? I’m always screwing something up when I prepare my posts to cut and paste into the contest, and I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before.

http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=69

Working out the HTML in advance is definitely a good idea. I’ve used the scratchpad contest for that in the past and it works well. But lately I’ve been posting “preview” pages on my personal website instead. That way I can shop the images as they will appear to kindly co-workers the offer constructive criticism. Plus the HTML pages are really simple, so I can just “view page source” and cut-n-paste the entries into the Fark submission form.

But yeah, putting up the HTML beforehand has reduced my frustration a lot. It was especially useful this week since I took corsec67 suggestion and included a link to the original contest.

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The selection process is painful for me this week. I started with 24 “finalists”, today got that down to 11 with some difficulty, drove myself nuts focusing it to 5 a couple of minutes ago, and will probably debate which to use as the 3rd entry until I hit the “submit” button.

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I could see this contest becoming an annual end-of-the-year type contest, much like our anniversary theme…

I think that’s a fine idea… I like a lot of the entries I’m picking from this week and suspect that will be the same a year from now.

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I posted a few more w/ my new-found effect(s) on flickr. Comments welcome.

Wow, that’s fun! The hand prints, etc… on the shower curtain are particularly good. Looks like a really bad digital horror flick, maybe a home version of Psycho? I like the portrait too.

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Translation: shoot as much now before it craps out cause something might turn out pretty damn cool!

I agree, take tons of shots until it dies. I love random distortions in photos.

And Elsinore, that link you provided to the whacked portrait was awesome!

My brand new toy, Nikon D80, this this just once. The other 100+ photos shot that day were fine and it’s never happened again.

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Picking a group of “finalists” image wasn’t hard this week. There are a number of photos I like but didn’t end up choosing for contests.

But… picking three out of that pool is proving very difficult. It’s like picking your three favorites kids out of a group that has been rejected once already. It’s proving to be much harder to decide what to submit this week.

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Most of these photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pjern/sets/72157603511193244/

are with the Sigma 10-20. It’s my go-to lens for photographing cars.

I stopped by a camera store on the way home and checked out the Tamron 28-75mm. The guy helping me raved about the performance for the money too, so I guess it’s one big love fest for that lens. I asked what other lenses he would consider recommending for that zoom range and he said nothing else was close for the price. I was good and walked out empty handed. While it’s definitely a good value it’s still too much for an impulse purchase for me. He tried to tempt me with the “10% mail in rebate from Tamron” ploy, but I still escaped. 🙂

I also asked about the Sigma 10-20 and he said he liked that lens too but that a new Tamron was as good or better for similar situations. It’s full product name is “SP AF10-24mm F/3.5-4.5 Di-II LD Aspherical [IF]” which is a real mouthful. Here’s the link to the product page on their website in case you want to read the propaganda and specs.

Tamron 10-24mm

The weight, size and feel of both lenses were very good. But they were closing in ~5 minutes so I didn’t have time to try them.

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Damn you all, now I want to buy lenses. 🙂 I just read through the Sigma, Tamron and Tokina product lines and there’s lots of interesting options out there. Obviously the right answer it to have many lenses so no matter what you’re shooting you have the perfect glass ready to go. But until I have unlimited funs (and a sherpa to haul my gear!) I’m going to have to pick wisely. So this sort of feedback is invaluable.

Also, for what it’s worth, got my first DSLR about 7 months and only have two lenses. The kit lens I got is a Nikon 18-55 VR which I dislike for some reason. So within a week of getting the camera I bought an inexpensive tele-macro, the Tamron 70-300 that corsec67 mentioned. That’s pretty much all I use at the moment and every digital shot I’ve submitted here was with that lens. It’s been a good learning lens for me since I like to shoot outdoors while walking/hiking in the daytime, haul a tripod around with me and generally use manual focus. The macro on the Tamron (only kicks in 180-300mm) has been lots of fun too. I don’t have anything to compare it with, but with a tripod I found it quite usable. You can get detailed shots without having to be close to what you are shooting, which makes setups easier for me. But I want something that works better while handheld in lower light situations. The Tamron 28-75 f/2.8 is on the short list at the moment…

I also would like a +300mm telephoto lens too since the views from the hills in the SF area are extraordinary and sometime you just want to zoom way out there. But nothing I’ve found in that category is close to affordable, so that will have to wait!

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Also if one of the main frustrations you have with Vista is the annoying “Do you want to allow XXX?” pop-ups, try disabling UAC (or UAT?) and see how much that improve things. I had that sucker turned off for good within 1 hour of a forced Vista upgrade at work. I also hit the “optimize for speed” button in the display options management screen. Those two changes made a huge difference for me and I mostly don’t even notice the difference anymore.

I still prefer UNIX (or Linux, which is UNIX-like) over Windows, but I don’t find using Vista a problem.

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One option you could consider is using VMWare (or other virtualization software?) so that you could run both Linux and some flavor of Windows at the same time. You could let Linux control the hardware (meaning you boot it first) and do most of you work there. But you could have VMWare+Windows running as well for software which doesn’t have a viable Linux alternative.

Also, I will note that I’m using Vista on my work system and don’t mind it. But pretty much just use it to run MS Office applications, Seamonkey (which is Firefox plus other stuff), Gimp and CygWIN (UNIX like shell).

Finally, if this is a home system why do you care about support? I’ve never found the need to call MS for OS help. Maybe if there were no more security patches it might be a problem, but even then you can pretty much isolate your system behind a personal firewall at home. And virus scanning companies are likely to continue supporting XP for a very long time, probably even after MS has stopped.

PS – Linux is my primary personal use system and my partner has a Windows XP system. If you do go to Linux, I think the tricky choice is whether to go with 32 bit or 64 bit versions. I opted for 64 bit and like the fact that I can use tons of RAM not worry about slowing things down. But it limits the precompiled software you can get, so I don’t have Flash for instance. It might be available if I hunted but it’s certainly not as easy as it would be if I was running 32 bit.

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Two quick comments on this week’s voting, both pure speculation based on very little data. Welcome to the Internet, eh? 🙂

1. The number of votes seems pretty low overall. The leading entry only has 24 votes for instance. I think the fact that it’s the week before Christmas has many people’s work and personal schedules in disarray.

2. Usually there’s a couple of “break away” images in terms of vote count which are the clear favorites and then a group of popular, but not leading entries clumped together with less votes. This week, at least so far, there’s no breakaway group.

So maybe a running/cycling competition analogy will help? There’s no smaller group of leaders that have broken away from the main pack. That leads me to believe that this race isn’t normal in some way, probably because less people are voting.

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Wow, I didn’t know you could get those sorts of features/performance for those prices.

Thanks!

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The moon has been exceptionally bright lately, I’ve noticed it’s been much more visible during the day then normal even down here in the SF area.

But THAT shot is ridiculously pretty.

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