Speaker For The Diodes - June 1st, 2008

Jun. 1st, 2008

05:34 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2007-01-14:

"The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners." -- Florence King, humorist and conservative columnist formerly of "National Review" magazine.

(submitted to the mailing list by Kelly Groves)

[Does this accurately reflect common American perceptions? It sounds a bit off to me ... but the social circles in which I spend most of my time may not constitute representative samples.]

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03:25 pm - Some Recent (and sortakindarecentish) Photos

A partial list of recent Flickr updates that I haven't put in their own journal entries, from both the old and new digital cameras ... Misc stuff I've seen, and one attempt to turn a munged photo into something impressionist:

FireCloud Confused (4) Sunset Near Mt. Airy Dancers at a Wedding Public Service A Slice of Pratt St.

A couple more macro shots[*]:

Missed the shot by a nose Flake

And finally, pointing a camera at a camera -- four decades (and a wee adaptor ring) between body and lens, and the bellows rig I use for some of my macro shots (I also use a macro lens, or stick a normal lens backward in front of another normal lens; I have some "close up filters" -- magnifiers that screw onto the front of a lens -- but usually forget they're there). I put the old screwmount lens on because I didn't want to bother removing the adaptor after I'd been using the bellows, and it turned out to still be a pleasant lens to shoot with, even on a camera made forty years later.

Four Decades I'm Ready For My Close Up

I'm still sorting out how I want to use Flickr (and how that use will relate to my journal). There seem to be several sensible ways to go about it.

[*] The insect in the first set of thumbnails isn't technically macro[**]. I chased it all around my ceiling with a 100-300mm lens (what Trix refers to as my "baseball bat lens") at a normal shooting distance and fairly ordinary magnification. Then I cropped away the vast expanse of blank ceiling in the rest of the frame. I eventually trapped it in a plastic cup and flung it out the window (the bug, not the cup) where it seemed happier. I put a few more frames (out of two hundred twenty-two frames that I shot trying to catch it in focus) on Flickr.

[**] It still amuses me that for etymolgical reasons, 'macro' and 'micro' in photography are differences of degree in the same direction rather than being antonyms. (The "largeness" of 'macro' refers to the magnification ratio, and "smallness" of 'micro' refers to the subject.)

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