(Tuesday, February 12th, 2008)
The stars of show business and other stars are chased all around the world by paparazzis. Sometimes even catch them in X-ray photos. Here are the evidences:
(Sunday, February 10th, 2008)
I recently stumbled upon several good ideas for the photographer (and cinematographer) with a limited budget. They seem quite simple and interesting to apply.
For macro-photography and proxi-photography, a flash is often needed. But it is difficult to obtain a nice light not simply coming from the side (and casting ugly shadows). This is why exist those ring flashes that are usually so expensive.
Today, Strobist provides a neat little idea to make nearly free ring flash out of a common cobra flash. Just use a circle (more precisely, an ellipse) of cardboard or white metal to reflect the light of a more common flash light (see the image below). In seconds, you’ll get most of the advantages of a ring flash without changing your equipment.
The flash light comes from the side and is reflected toward the scene while the hole in the middle allow the lens to peer naturally into the scene.
You may know that a steady-cam is a simple rig that allows to stabilize a video camera for use while walking or running. It is so essentially simple that Johnny Lee made one out of three metal pipes and a weight. It is much nicer than the expensive pro ones and you can easily copy the design if you do not want to pay for the 39$ he asks for it.
If you have been attentive, you can remember that there were similar other ideas popping up in these pages before.
(Friday, January 18th, 2008)
After having shot a few hundreds (er… a few thousands) photos in Brazil, I ended up with a stack of images. Some were easy to label. Some were less esay to label. Particularly, for wild birds, the problem is to quickly determine the species that is appearing on the photo. Several solutions are open to an amateur photographer like me to avoid making too many big mitakes when trying to differentiate two species of brown hawk-like creatures, to greyish little birds, or even two small greenish parrots.
The first solution (and certainly the best one) is to ask experts. You can go to the nearest University, but the Internet made it even easier with the appearance of many amateur forums with an impressive collective knowledge. Some are so precise and helpful that the best experts may pale in comparison. We’ll come back to it. There are other solutions too.
First, I decided to work all by myself. Failing to write down all the information provided by the guide during the safari (note to myself: next time, bring a small paper notebook), I had to find a large and good source of reference images for the animals I was interested into. With a minimal knowedge and some personal work, a lot of identification can be done like that without too many errors if you stayed concentrated on checking all details in bird feathers and colors (and, sometimes, note : “Right! Noam told us this one was a…”).
For Brazilian birds, I used mainly two good sources: Arthur Grosset’s Birds and Oiseaux.net. The first is in English and contains an astonishing amount of data, surprisingly coming from one guy only. The second is in French and is the result of cooperation on a common project where there are description, photos, living regions, etc.
Like so many collaborative Internet sites, there are surprising holes and it is a work-in-progress. But for all common species, endemic species and even some rare ones, the information is very detailed and precise. Often enough to cross-check and identify firmly the animal. Text comments may be needed to support the small differences between two similar birds, when it all lays in photo details not easy to spot.
Let’s add a remark: recent changes in classification categories and names, recent splits and regrouping of existing species often create some added diffiulties. Finally, names are quite different from one country to the next (not only from one language to the next). So, it may happen that a single birds has several names. Beware!
(Thursday, January 10th, 2008)
If you are a gamer (as in video games), if you like the challenge of confronting other players in FPS shootouts, if you are using GNU/Linux, you will be interested to find the comparison brought by LinuX-gamers.net: Comparison of Free Software Shooters with:
(Sunday, January 6th, 2008)
List of the best file-oriented utilities for Windows:
According to LifeHacker.
(Wednesday, December 26th, 2007)
A backup, this is nearly nothing. But it can help you, it can save you, when disaster will strike. Since when didn’t you backup?
Some ideas:
It’s time to prepare yourself for a better-backed-up year.
(Thursday, November 29th, 2007)
When you follow a broken link in this web site, you will fall onto an error page. Of course, this does not happen very often (Ed.: I hope so!); I decided to give you a direct list of the error pages to answer to the standard erorr code 404 page not found.
(Sunday, October 28th, 2007)
Year after year, there are a few photo images that wrote History. LukeProg found 52 of them. The choice is always subjective, but most of them really hit the public.
(Monday, October 15th, 2007)
Today is Blog Action Day: The day that bloggers chose to try and help save the planet from the impact of Human activity. For my own part, I decided to collect a few ideas to save energy in your computer usage:
Another trick: Power saving remote computing.
(Friday, September 28th, 2007)
Science-Fiction produced both the worst and the best. Today, let’s look at the worst with the help of ForeverGeek that collected the Top 10 WORST Sci-Fi Shows EVER! w/Videos.
That is so bad that’s it’s admirable!
(Monday, September 24th, 2007)
Personal research: What are the web sites best ranked for a Google search on the first figures? The results are… interesting:
Wikipedia collects it when nobody wants them, but TV channels are hoarding the numbers.
(Thursday, September 20th, 2007)
101 Ways To Know Your Software Project Is Doomed, a strange list for software developers. Thanks to CodeSqueeze.
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Latest update: 24-jun-08
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