July 26th, 2010
A new Mac Pro is long overdue, and I need one. Lightroom’s too slow on my vintage 2007 MacBook, and more importantly Warcraft is only giving me about 5 FPS. :-) If the new machine is fast enough, maybe I could even use Parallels/VMWare/Bootcamp instead of my Windows 7 desktop PC (which clocks 60 FPS in WoW without breathing hard). Maybe Apple will release new models tomorrow? If it does, I want to compare it to today’s prices, so if I bought today behind door #1 we have:
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July 22nd, 2010
Sunday morning Janet Schumacher and I drove out to Cupsogue Beach County Park on the south shore of Long Island to look for the Hudsonian Godwit that had been reported there since the previous weekend. I first saw it at low tide around 9:15 AM on the first sandbar in the bay, visible from just past the trailer parking area. However the bill looked a little off and I wasn’t sure before the bird took off. Could have been a Dowitcher in intermediate plumage. Then, after walking a mile out to the point and back again, we relocated it at exactly the same spot and got much better looks at it, including a few (bad) photographs.
At least I hope that’s the bird. (Lower right foreground) It was easier to see through the scope which gives you much several times more magnification than my 400mm lens (roughly equivalent to a pair of binoculars). To get this much I had to scan along the sandbar snapping away and then blow up the photos later at home.
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June 26th, 2010
Suppose I edit a raw file in Photoshop with levels as follows:
What are the Lightroom equivalents of these values? Is there a mathematical formula that converts from Photoshop’s black, white, and midpoint slider values to Lightroom’s Exposure, Blacks, Recovery, Fill Light, Brightness, and Contrast sliders?
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June 20th, 2010
I shoot raw, and develop in Lightroom. (Version 2; just haven’t upgraded quite yet but I suspect the questions are the same for the recently released version 3.) Sometimes the results are pretty good out of the box, but usually they require a lot of manual tweaking to make the light work. I suspect they may be designed more for wedding and portrait and landscape photography and the like and less for the wildlife and macro photography I like to do. There are two areas I have questions about, the initial settings and the auto adjustments.
Here’s a harvestman with Lightroom’s default settings:
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June 14th, 2010
Verizon’s level of incompetence is stunning. They are so bad they can’t accept payments online or over the phone. They have to out source that to another company. Instead of a simple form like every other e-commerce company on the planet, they want you to install software to pay them. And then the install doesn’t work!
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June 1st, 2010
Although I used to be quite involved in World of Warcraft, I gradually grew tired of it, and about a year ago I canceled my account. It wasn’t that I was bored with it. I still wanted to play it, but the game had moved away from me, and no longer offered the experience it once did. When Wrath of the Lich King came out I was so far behind the curve I decided to cancel rather than upgrade. Here are some thoughts on what a game might do to get me back.
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Posted in Videogames | 1 Comment »
