@choc-ful-a
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Choc-Ful-A
ParticipantI think it will still help, for two reasons. First, the interpretations of the TSA rules is important and the TSA staff fails miserably on that count. At least a competant private security service can be managed by the airport authority to be as reasonable as possible and still following the mandated procedures. TSA will never be manageable, they are a parasitic agency of the government, by design. Second, if enough people kicked the TSA to the curb the size of the agency would shrink, hopefully out of existance. That alone would be a blessing and it left unchecked they will continue to grow and become even more intrusive.
And so it begins…
The main goal of bureaucratic organizations is to protect the grow the organization. So of course the TSA is decided there’s no reason to let people leave after their “review”.
ParticipantFWIW, the move to require aitports to use TSA sercurity services wasn’t permanent. After 3 years any airport can elect to toss that company out and hire private securty. Some places have done just that and IMO it’s time more airport authorities follow suit. Regardless of what political leanings we all may have, I think we can all agree the TSA has been a failure on multiple levels.
Except that the TSA says that’ll only happen if the replacement contractors perform exactly the same procedures as the current rank-and-file blue-shirted douchebags.
And since those procedures are a large part of the problem, simple replacement of the blue-shirted douchebags with privately-contracted douchebags won’t change anything…
I think it will still help, for two reasons. First, the interpretations of the TSA rules is important and the TSA staff fails miserably on that count. At least a competant private security service can be managed by the airport authority to be as reasonable as possible and still following the mandated procedures. TSA will never be manageable, they are a parasitic agency of the government, by design. Second, if enough people kicked the TSA to the curb the size of the agency would shrink, hopefully out of existance. That alone would be a blessing and it left unchecked they will continue to grow and become even more intrusive.
ParticipantFWIW, the move to require aitports to use TSA sercurity services wasn’t permanent. After 3 years any airport can elect to toss that company out and hire private securty. Some places have done just that and IMO it’s time more airport authorities follow suit. Regardless of what political leanings we all may have, I think we can all agree the TSA has been a failure on multiple levels.
March 11, 2012 at 6:20 pm in reply to: NEF + jpg fine in camera -or- NEF only and convert later #45748ParticipantGIMP will preview NEF files as thumbnails natively even though it can’t open the full res image. I don’t know if it’s building the thumbnail or extracting one that’s embedded in the NEF format, but it does let you inspect your RAW files (at least Nikon ones) to see what’s in them.
Also, if you have an image editing progam that can handle all 12 bits of color info in the RAW files, you can always convert the RAW files to 16 bit PNG’s instead of JPEG. They are rather big, but if you want the detail you want the detail. And disk is pretty cheap these days.
March 11, 2012 at 5:42 am in reply to: NEF + jpg fine in camera -or- NEF only and convert later #45738ParticipantI’m pretty sure I’ve said this somewhere on this site before, so I’ll give the short version.
I shot in NEF only, convert then to PNG in a batch when I upload to my Linux system, that script just calls “ufraw”. Since PNG is lossless, there’s none of the detail loss caused by JPEG compression. Then I just use GIMP to open the PNG’s for the most part. I sometimes will go back to the NEF’s to see if a difference conversion will prove interesting. Then I just open them with ufraw or Raw Therapee and if I like what I find, I’ll save them as PNG’s after the edits. The only time I convert things to JPEG format is once an image is completely done and I want to post it online.
ParticipantI was searching for a site that listed the weight of that insane Sigma f2.8 “green” zoom lens, which is ~35 pounds supposedly, and I found this fun page of zany lens trivia and thought you all might get a kick out of reading it. The first one is reported to weigh over 500 pounds! wtf?
ParticipantAs someone who yells and threatens violence about SACD and D-VHS not catching on, I’ve gotta ask, could someone explain what’s wrong with this in terms of the product as delivered in the medium chosen by the consumers of the product?
Where were the people who demand quality when SACD came out? People were blabbing on about “ohh, I love my vinyl, blah blah blah, I’m a stupid head, blah blah blah, mp3 sucks, I never even tried SACD”! Well where is it? Where is the better than CD quality sound now?
Where were the people who demand quality when D-VHS came out? People were blabbing on with “tape is obsolete, and blah blah blah, no more rewinding, blah blah blah, oh optical is so sharp”. Well where’s your god damn lossless recording now!? A decade later, where the hell is it!? We had $5 50gb tapes that could have easily gone to 1tb if it took off.
Where are the people pushing for digital backs for SLRs? I want a god damn Foveon sensor on my god damn camera. I don’t want a new body when a better sensor comes out. I could use a 30 year old Pentax just fine! Let me buy a god damn $400 body and keep it for 20 years and replace the god damn sensor every 5!Amen! It’s the triumph of marketting driven apathy over self-interest IMO. We as a people have become adept at manipulating public opinon, which could be a good thing. But it’s often used to keep people complacent rather than to build support for something worthwhile.
And as far as the linked story goes, if I was going to pay for a photo of a professional athlete in a bathroom, it would not be a head/shoulders shot.
ParticipantI need to process yet, which is going to be a mostly manual affair until I grok writing scripts in Linux to automate things.
I’m happy to help you grok the scripting if you want. Post here, PM or send e-mail if you want to explain what you’re looking to automate.
ParticipantI typically build my own computers too since I like picking exactly what components go into the system. And I also enjoy turning a bunch of boards, cables and random crap into a working thing. But the last time I went out shopping to buy parts to build a desktop, the guy at the shop told me that for another $45 they would assemble whatever I bought and give me a 12 month warranty on it. OK, I don’t love assembling things THAT much….
So you might want to ask the local computer shop how much they charge to build a system from the parts you purchase. If it’s $45 in Silicon Valley, it might be even less in less insane parts of the country.
As for backup devices…. IMO disk is pretty inexpensive these days and it’s really simple to setup USB attached external backup disks with adapters that just let you push/pull disks on the fly, or buy multi-disk external adapters. So you can just keep the disk from your old computer as external backup drives when you upgrade, or buy cheap/slow drives when you see them on sale. Your backup disks don’t need to be fast, they are connected via USB anyway.
And another thought on SSD’s instead of traditional disks… They are much, MUCH quieter and don’t use as much power either. So it’s definitely worth considering.
ParticipantI don’t believe the ‘undo my vote” mechanism is supposed to work they way it’s been described here, so yeah probably a glitch. As I understood it, you have a limited amount of time after voting to “undo” that vote. But it’s on the order of 15 seconds after you hit the vote button. So if you can reverse your vote days later I don’t think that’s what’s supposed to be possible.
ParticipantI was born in DC and lived in/around the it for 40 years before moving to the Left Coast, so it was nice to see photos from all around the city. The first thought I had is that I miss spending time in DC, it really is a wonderful place. And the second though was, “Holy hell, that’s a lot of ground to cover in a ‘walk’!” It would be interesting to show the places you got to on a map since I don’t think people who aren’t from the area realize how much you traveled to get that group of locations. The metro shots probably give a clue as to how you made that happen. 🙂
And finally, the results are impressive on multiple levels. It’s nice to see a group of people having fun doing something creative that’s often a solitary pursuit. And I loved seeing all the different perspectives and treatments from the various photographers, sometimes of the exact same location/subject. When collected together like that it really does feel like a photo documentary of an event.
ParticipantFine work all around this week, and yes the lady recruiter was kind of startling to me as I scrolled down. Definitely made an impression. Kind of like those joke videos that went around that asked you to stare intently at the screen while they play.
Her eyes are absolutely bizarre in that shot and it’s wonderfully odd. In fact, I could see it working well as the starting image for a Photoshop contest. 🙂 I wouldn’t submit it without making sure Yoyo is OK with it, but I’m just saying…
ParticipantJust to clarify and avoid embarrassing myself, is the requirement for this theme that we talk to strangers and ask them to take a photo up close? Or just to take photos of strangers up close? I’ve got shots from street festivals, protests, etc… but I generally didn’t wind up talking to the people in the photos.
ParticipantLooking for some general input this week, I’ve got WAY more shots for this than for a usual thread. Here is a G+ album of my potentials
https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/103515623805931649065/albums/5701990388388722193
So any thoughts as to what you good folks like would be much appreciated in making final selections.
I like “Pinks” a lot. The composition is nice with the compression of the diagonal lines of the fence/road as the distance increased and the fact that the only pink/red is in the little girl on the right and a tiny bit way in the distance on the other side of the photo. Her face and posture are very cute too. The only downside is that it’s horizontal which is a pain for Fark since you are constrained to 640 width.
I also like the B&W one called “Dad and Daughter”. The fact that it’s shot down, the camera is also a little titled to the left, and the subjects are looking at something out of the shot all make it work for me.
ParticipantNice! I’m going to have fun checking some of those out.
I’d recommend adding a link to the UFRAW website in the FREEWARE section.
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