@schnee
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schnee
Participantbtw, any other people post images in abandoned threads to see how they look first? or am i the only paranoid..
I 2nd Elsinore’s suggestion for the scratch pad.
also how strict are we about using an image in a subsequent contest
Strict, but it’s getting stricter. Its not something that can be enforced – I doubt Fark mods would delete a recycled entry. But, the FSM will eventually stop counting recycled entries when it does its stats thingies. And there’s the shame in wearing The Scarlet R.
ParticipantLots of things:
First, thanks for the feedback. Keep it coming. Don’t be shy. I can probably handle the math; I need ideas.
The ratings will take the place of the Greatest Evar / Greatest Recently reports. They may or may not replace them, but keep reading.
I want the FSM to be a value-add to Fark first, Farktography.net 2nd. That means that the FSM will strive to match the results on Fark. Since Fark allows for votes after Farktography.net “calls” the contest (thanks for doing that, veruca!), we have at least two versions of the truth. Probably three since “striving to match” doesn’t mean “exactly matching”. The FSM stops picking up late votes after 4 weeks; I’m not sure when Fark “archives” a thread – there’s probably a window. Personally, I really like the Farktography.net placings – they give a sense of urgency to the contest (come on Secret Voting Block! Get those votes in!).
I was talking to some co-workers about this. One of the guys was a moto-cross rider and he told me how those scores work. In his league, place-finishing was all that mattered – points were scored according to 1st, 2nd, 3rd, &c. In other leagues, points were also granted based on “fastest lap”, “winning pole position”, and other factors. In his league, not finishing really killed chances at the championship. In the other leagues, not so much. But in the other leagues, riders tended to be more conservative since they could pick up points for other things. Not sure how this applies to Farktography, but it is interesting.
Marley, I hear what you are saying. You’ve already taken a hit by missing those months, why heap insult on injury by using my R ratio. Very good point. “Participation” is built-in to place-scoring and voting. I’ll probably nix the R ratio. Keep in mind, however, that I’m going to do an “Evar” and a “Recent” rating: “Recent” only looks at the past 10 contests. My “fascination” on participation is based on the “Greatest Averages Evar” report – there are some amazing averages from people who don’t participate all that much. I introduced the artificial threshold of 10 contests to keep that report distinct from the one-hit-wonder report, but 10 is pretty arbitrary – I have a vague feeling of uneasiness.
Elsinore, your ideas of multiple scores contains echoes of the conversation that I had with co-workers. One guy had the idea of something equivalent to the Bowl Championship Series in US College Football: multiple rankings that combine into some overall rating (the FCS, if you will). The software engineer in me is very intrigued (oooohhh, pluggable scoring engines – shiny!), but I’m a bit hesitant to really formalize that. 1) It sounds like a lot of work and, well, that’s about it really. Still, I live in the US, home of the BCS and with fresh memories of the 2000 Presidential Election. I love that sort of conflict (seriously, I live in Austin, TX but I’m a USC graduate (which if you don’t follow college football, doesn’t mean much)). Maybe I can come up with something – total votes, place finishing, best averages – maybe they all combine into a rating that we can argue about forever (‘we’ the community, not you and I – we’re cool).
ParticipantYou really are serious about getting rid of the bulk!
ParticipantThe most tedious part is going to be populating the winners database.
“Tedious” is my middle name! No, wait, …
Anyway, attached are two zip files containing a single CSV file eash. Those CSV files contain all the rankings (1st, 2nd, 3rd, &c) for every entry for every theme (and the farktographer and the URL).
May be of use.
ParticipantMidday report, by the numbers:
Total Votes: 2285 (#1 in the past 20 weeks)
Total Farktographers: 120 (outdone recently by shadows at 130, but then you’d have to go back to B&W at 150)
Total Entries: 238 (which does go all the way back to B&W – lot of civic pride here or something)Pretty nice response! Pretty nice photographs, too!
July 27, 2006 at 1:22 pm in reply to: Image sizes too small after posting to Farktography comp! #4815Participantschnee, thank you.
You are welcome. The scratchpad suggestion made it into the boobies this week and is there to stay.
ParticipantParticipantHey! You stole my background! 🙂
http://oneweb.utc.edu/~ray-soldano/photography/7-26-06/DSC_8785.JPG
http://www.flickr.com/photos/schneeman/73570850/in/set-1566112/
Its nice to get the dust off, ain’t it?
ParticipantPolarizers were sort of discussed earlier. In a nutshell, they are useful to control reflections. For a mid afternoon sports shooter, this could be beneficial. Are you talking water sports? Have you ever had a lot of reflection off the water? A polarizer could stomp that out. Similarly, if you’ve ever taken a photo of a racetrack where the asphalt is all shiney, that shinyness is due to reflections. Grass reflects, too.
A big drawback for polarizers is that they steal 2 stops of light – this means that it would be harder to stop action -> more motion blur as the athletes hit the ball (or whatever). Can be artistic, but… I have a polarizer on whenever I’m doing landscapes. Not so much when I’m doing portraiture or photos of the kids.
Multicoating. Hmmm. Was is a “UV” or a “Skylight” filter? Those filters are supposed to reduce a blue cast due to light being reflected by atmospheric particles. Supposed to be helpful in mountain photos where you have gobs of landscape going through tons of atmosphere. I’ve never noticed the difference (but I’ve never done a controlled test, either). I put my skylight filter on when I give my camera to someone who probably won’t treat the optics nice – it acts as a physical protector.
“Multicoating” as a term is something very desireable for a zoom lens or a filter for a zoom lens. It has to do with the “characteristic impedance of free space” – as light travels through space and hits a glass surface, an uncoated surface will reflect (due to impedance mismatch). A coated surface tries to better match the impedance, reducing the relfection, leading to more light hitting the imaging device (film, CCD). Multicoating just does it better. For a concrete example, have you ever seen someone’s eyeglasses that reflect gobs of light? Those glasses are not coated. Ones that don’t reflect are coated.
Note that I wrote “zoom lens”. Zooms tend to have many optical elements which all introduce light loss. Coating those elements mitigates that loss. Prime focus lenses are simpler and not as susecptible to light loss.
(I really like “characteristic impedance of free space” as a phrase and try to work it in whenever possible. Its harder than you may think)
Participant…I sent it into another site’s photo contest this month:
Are we going to stand for this sort of blatant two-timing? 😀
nice shot!
ParticipantIt has a very nifty lcd screen that flips out and around (I think the S1 has that too?).
I don’t have a small digicam, but if I were in the market for one, I’d look for an LCD that has the flip-spin-rotate action. I’m envious of those who have cameras with that.
I’d also look for something that is water-resistant (if not downright water-proof).
Favor optical zoom over digital, which could probably go without saying to this crowd.
ParticipantRedSawyer90 is the lucky winner of the prize for the 10,000th voted-on entry. Yea, RedSawyer90!
ParticipantWas just curious if anyone has had much experience with 500mm lenses? This is what I’m looking at buying http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=productlist&A=details&Q=&sku=102446&is=USA&addedTroughType=categoryNavigation
Would love some input!
I don’t have such a lens, but I’ve read about them.
+ cost -inexpensive
+ size -small length for the 500mmThe center obstruction (that big disk right in the middle of the lens) will reduce the contrast in your images.
An interesting comparison between that lens type and a much more expensive lens can be found at:
http://www.photo.net/learn/optics/mirrors/
It has sample images and everything.
Participantlet me know and i’ll post it in the weeners tonight. that’s great news though. woohoo!
will do. probably in a couple of hours.
ParticipantDefinitely got the 10,000th voted-on entry this week.
I’m going to let the voting settle out a bit before declaring the 10K’er. The FSM has no insite into when votes were cast, so what I’m going to do is “simply” order all the entries by their posting timestamp and pick the 10,000th entry as The One. Since I only collect voted-on entries, a vote for an “earlier” entry could bump the ordering a bit.
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