Portrait work a friend/musician. Details at my Flickr account if someone's interested.

Quote from Don :

hey, use your own style

Imitation is the greatest form of flattery! In my books you're the king of photography of stuff going fast.

Quote from Blackout :

Sorry for the huge post. Here is some rubbish from about 1100 shots in which about 1/4 were usable. Pictures taken yesterday in the freezing Finnish summer.

All you need is some Don-esque PP!

(I'll pull these down immediately if you want.)

Quote from rich uk :

Fuji autofocus system is actually rubbish. tripod, 2 second delay so no vibrations from me, and perfec focus on a leaf with no wind at all. and it's out of focus!!! Manual focus is fiddly and insanely slow. takes over 20 seconds to not even focus to differently and i cant seem to speed this up. Any help is appreciated. Short of a new camera.
Camera is "Fuji FinePix S8000fd".

Lovely pictures don.

When I was in school they had similar Fujis around and the AF was dreadful compared to D70 back then in the days. They were probably (can't remember correctly) contrast detection based systems thus very slow. Contrast detection should be accurate though (if there's enough light) but if you had a short DOF and the leaf moved for a millimeter or two when your shutter delay was ticking it could look out of focus.

Or your shutter speed was too low?

You can assist the AF by pointing the subject with a flashlight beam giving the AF sensor more data to work on.

Last edited by spankmeyer, Sun 7 Jun 2009, 21:06.

Zopmie Pnacic Source is teh sechs!

Does anyone else think that Valve should just stop making games and focus on movie industry? TF2 is fun for shits and giggles, yeah, L4D is fun-though-more-linear-than-a-straight-edge-ruler but their main title HL2 and its short sequels were such an abysmal failure on all levels.

Quote from Mackie The Staggie :

Of cource there is a God, although it changes every 2/4 years depending upon who knocks England out of the World Cup.

Obviously Maradona is still the no1 God.

Show's over. Good night.

Quote from JJ72 :

Or maybe there's a god but his house is only large enough for a few people, so he couldn't invite you in.

and when you seize to exist you wouldn't know anything, your ability to understand something only go as far as the moment before you are gone, so you really wouldn't know.

Could a God make such a big party and fail to deliver enough beer at the same time?

If/when you seize to exist and disappear back into cosmos as energy, one could argue that yes, in the end, you proved to the former entity of yours that there's no God as there was no afterlife and thus ignorance (since you cannot comprehend your disappearance) is bliss/Heaven in the end.

However if you think that turning back into some form of energy in shape of microwaves, atomic particles, heat, radiation is the same as afterlife/finding a pleasant God, then I'd say things turned out for the best in the end despite things looked really shitty at some point of our lives.

EDIT: I choose not to vote as the options are lacking.

Quote from JJ72 :

Or maybe you won't.

Technicalities. If you simply seize to exist then there's no God. If you get invited to a house party, there's a God.

You'll find out in the end so why worry now?

Quote from Ian.H :

Here's a few pics that have been taken over the past few days before the weather turned crappy. Although the 2nd image is a bit dark (under exposed?).. for some reason, I'm quite liking the "effect"

Yep, the overall scene is underexposed as the camera tried to keep the sky from burning out. Spot and center-weighted metering gives practically the same results on every camera (size of the metering points of course matters) but without going into details the matrix metering on modern DSLRs tend to be tuned differently between manufacturers. Some manufacturers or models between pro and consumer may expose quite differently in difficult scenarios as they either throw the shadows or highlights to trash when trying to find the optimal exposure. Most of them are however are consistent so just keep on taking pictures and take mental notes - analyze the scene and try to imagine where the histogram bumps will fall before pushing the shutter release and then check your prediction.

Blaablaablaa in summary. Remember to have fun!

By the way the focus was way off in the black mini picture. You should have focused on the lady's trunk.

Eeeehhoooorrrmmm...

Wats dem platform this time? XBux360? PS3?

If Forza 2 got thumbs up from LFS forum peeps, the 3 might be worth buying even though I'd have to get the console first too.

Quote from Sueycide_FD :

Can't the same be done with the Volvo game?

Yes but you'd die of old age before making through a single lap in a such a boat.

Format C:\

1-minute-photoshoot on a way from a business meeting to another, my co-worker and I spotted a small park to vandalize-- I mean to enjoy.

Not sure about dem colours so I might re-upload a better one later.

Boys pretending to be tough and making silly noises 0 - Justice 1

I want to see a friendly German too.

Pretty awkward, trust me.

Also when you're really drunk and can't tell if the girl is 20 or 40.

The boy-kicking-a-concrete-wall-accidentally-the-whole-leg video was way better.

Too busy golfin', no tiem for pics!

Accidentally the whole G25?

Never handled the Pentax DSLRS but at least they seem to bring something new to the low-end mark.

Quote from Don :

since you mentioned the RAW/Lightroom problem, here is another one I'm having:

When I import my RAWs to Lightroom (shot in sRGB, Lightroom set to work in sRGB), the reds are so wrong, they are more like orange. I heard it doesn't happen in other RAW processing programs, so perhaps the ACR in Lightroom is wrong?

http://don.vn.cz/temp/repo/raw_vs_jpg/raw_vs_jpg_1.jpg
http://don.vn.cz/temp/repo/raw_vs_jpg/raw_vs_jpg_2.jpg
(comparsion of JPG as came from camera VS. untouched raw, just converted to jpg)

I tried searching about this problem without any result... Nowadays it doesn't really bug me, since I know how to fix it, but from the beginning it was quite frustrating - I was scared to shoot ONLY to RAW, because I knew I couldn't get the colors right later.

Couple of things.

Lightroom works under ProPhoto RGB profile and you cannot change it and like I mentioned, no softproof options either. I'm hoping you're smart enough not to use sRGB as your monitor profile and have a hardware colorimeter calibrator.

RAW files are not colour managed. If you set your camera profile to sRGB or AdobeRGB, only in the in-camera JPGs and camera-rendered RAW previews are colour managed to your selected profile. Once you import RAWs to Lightroom, LR discards the in-camera previews (and lots of other data too) and creates its own preview based on ACR conversion and your chosen develope settings.

The last paragraph contains the reasons why you see the infamous colour shift when you process RAW files in LR or Bridge. Same thing happens in Aperture and any other 3rd party RAW conversion software.

They are all equally good/bad at guessing what the image should look like since only the camera manufacturer knows all the details about their own RAW format and do not disclose all the details to 3rd party software developers.

EDIT: Earlier I went through and tried probably all RAW converters there was and Lightroom had the best workflow with the rest of the Adobe suite that I use daily at work. Nikon's CaptureNX2 draws the RAWs beautifully but since the workflow and app itself are nightmares to use and LR gets 95% correct straight away after making custom conversion settings (update your ACR for latest imitation camera profiles), I'm happy.

Last edited by spankmeyer, Sun 17 May 2009, 10:41.

Quote from STROBE :

I just need to work out why exporting it to jpg with sRGB colour profile is losing so much richness in colour (especially greens) compared to the on-screen version within Lightroom - never noticed that happening before. :/

It happens because Lightroom works internally in Prophoto colour space and without any softproofing options so you can only crap your image out as SRGB and see how it turned out.

Camera RAW image data converted by ACR - or using AdobeRGB with in-camera-JPGs - will most of time contain more colour information than is possible to display with a regular monitor or that fits in sRGB's gamut.

Some scenes might contain more out-of-gamut colours (deep reds, deep blue skies etc.) and since you can't really force people to view them with a good image software that understands ICC profiling correctly and displays that get close to full AdobeRGB gamut you are just out of luck just like everybody else.