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When there’s a full moon and snow on the ground, once your eyes adjust, you can walk around just fine. With no moon and no light pollution, you can’t see your hand at the end of your arm.

That’s not just Alaska, you can tromp around in the desert or the plains by any sliver of moon as if it were late twilight. Most people just never spend enough time in the dark to get adapted.

I HATE LP. Turn the damn light off and learn to see. 😉

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also, a sign I found out in the woods:

That is so awesome.

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Hahaha…yikes I’m scared to have you review my photography now.

Uh-uh… THAT’s the critic you want. 😉 But then, I’m a technician, not a photographer; some clown playing with a camera.

Bucky, I hear ya on the pop-up flash… A friend of mine was wedded a few months back, and as they had a few friends who were amateur photographers, they didn’t go the route of hiring one. As a result we had 3 folks with decent gear and a love for capturing images roving around the ceremony and the wake. They were very happy with all the pictures. Multiple styles, various lighting (the most involved the lighting got was hot-shoe with a large diffuser). I shot all night with ambient. Lots of kinetic action on the dance floor, and IMHO nice, warm color for the ceremony. I hafta say I love being able to shoot auto at 6400.

Moral of the story: Open bar for the camera geeks.

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I really haven’t found that to be true. I’ve got a Sigma 20mm f/1.8 and have had two copies of the Canon 85mm f/1.8 and also the Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro.

One of the 85mm lenses would give me some CA, but the other, not at all. None of the other lenses has given me any.

I’m pretty demanding on the CA front, but then my main interest is astrophotography. Pinpoints on a black background will show any CA at all. Every L-series and Nikon ED lens I’ve used has suffered from CA. It’s there for terrestrial photography as well, but it’s not going to be anywhere near as obvious. The higher-end glass is certainly better in that regard, but I still have to stop them down 1 or 2 stops to get round stars on the edge of the field and shrink the purple halos over the entire field to a manageable level. The $100-$200 zooms are the worst, the halos are 20x the size of the stars.

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Sometimes I think Canon is actually sane about things compared to other large corporations. They got an instant boost of respect from me by releasing the 20Da, which a lot of astrophotographers jumped on. So many of them were modding their DSLRs to remove the IR block filters for HA imaging that Canon decided to give them what they wanted.

Maybe they realize that allowing folks to tinker with their gear might boost sales.

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ooooohhhhh… pretty. The earthshine shows up nicely.

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One thing that bears mentioning is how amazingly hard it is to color-correct a fast system. Even high-end glass suffers from a lot of CA when wide-open. You can drop $5k on a fast lens and it will still get smacked around like an unruly stepchild by a well-engineered APO triplet at f6 on the CA/sharpness front.

I haven’t had the chance to test any older glass in this regard, but I’d love to do a comparison someday.

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Seconds on Hugin’s. It’ll crunch whatever you throw at it. I’ve had no complaints throwing a Gig’s worth of images into it to stitch. I tried 3 Gig once, ran out of resources.

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Meh, illegible for me in FF under ubuntu. Oddly enough the text was legible under IE7 at work, but obscured with tools and widgets on the page. No matter, I see a trip to my local bookstore this weekend to help them make ends meet. I need some reading material ennyhoo.

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Man, optics for that sensor are gonna cost a fortune. Imagine what it takes to fully illuminate a frame that size and keep a flat focal plane… but yeah, *droool* 😉

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/me raises hand… would love to see that article.

Orionid, another canon owner here… I can’t recommend their P&Ss more. I’ve been using a powershot SD1100IS now for about 2 years. Great picture quality (they went with larger filesize/lower compression on the “fine” setting.. 5-6 meg per image in my case at 8MP). I’ve beaten the snot outta this thing and it still works flawlessly. I’m planning on doing a test drive of CHDK myself, if I can ever get some time off from work.

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Too cool… I’m gonna wind up getting struck trying to do some of these someday LOL

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Oh.. BTW… please note that inkjet almost sucks for anything that one might even loosely consider art. CMYK is far superior, but it will cost you a fortune unless you’re printing in bulk. Anyone here with printing experience is more than welcome to chime in… I’m very much of the mind to spend a few long weekends driving in a 500 mile radius to catch scenery+weather, and I really would like to be able get good quality prints at a fair price; even if it costs more than the inkjet folks.

(Trish (my wife) worked for a decade in the print industry, and I got to see a lot of cool examples beyond soup labels, not to mention she’s even more picky than I about color)

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Jeeze, Kestrana! yer setting the bar pretty high (love the images)…

I like this idea a lot, I think it’s a great phototopic. +1, here.

I’d feel better about voting for this if had time to contribute. Seriously, I love the contests. I wish I had the time to devote to the challenge. Every theme makes me look at things in a different way. Some of you folks create awesome human studies and it makes me think about why I restrict myself to landscapes and still life.

You’re all invited to the party when I get a life and decide to work less.

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DO IT. It won’t cost you much, really; and you’ll learn a lot.

I learned I need more RAM, and a bigger swap partition. My first run was attempted as a full-on 48-bit color composite of twenty-four 120meg TIFFs. I watched 4gig of RAM disappear, then 10gig of swap fill up before I killed the process and decided I needed to compose to HDR and send the LDR output off to the stitcher. I plan on increasing both RAM and the swap partition just for this kind of thing. And all the linux geeks told me I was wasting HD space with a 10G swap. “2G should be enough for ANYBODY!” LOL

So far what I’ve found about printing is that I’ve been rather conservative, or maybe just lucky to have stuck to not printing to a size that goes beyond the 300dpi mark. My final image is ~14K pixels wide, so I think I could conceivably go as large as 46″, but reduction is an asset when you have any noise in the base image; and my clouds have a sheen of static that thankfully didn’t show up at 36″.

Cost BTW, will of course vary, but a cheapskate like myself can get a passable 36″ print for under $50…. I’m still looking at printers, tho and will pay more if they have a better print process than Kinko’s.

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