Дон Андре's blog/

Have you ever wondered about the cool new GUI features in Windows Vista? I have ever since I started trying it at the start of February. After all the UI has 3D support and requires modern 3D capable graphics cards to display! One cannot even imagine the possibilities! Kill your files with a Doom2 double barreled shotgun instead of deleting them, wipe the whole harddrive clean with a BFG 2000 or encircle a folder with an army of Orc Grunts and Kodo beasts to make it surrender, browse your file system like a Galaxy - okay we've had that one already, but still 3D... Wow!

Then you take the Vista feature tour and your excitement drops like when you put that feather of your phantasy in that vacuum cage called Vista. The most prominent, or maybe the only new UI features are: translucent interface, task item preview and Flip 3D. Wow! Mankind has been waiting for Flip 3D!!

Here you can see it in a 23 second YouTube Video:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7plNStIUM20
You can really and actually flip through your windows in full 3D!! Upgrade to Vista now!

Millions of hours of work and a thousand marketing people cannot cover up that this leaves something to be desired and something to be continued...

Gerade stolpere ich über eine Seite wie ich sie schon lange nicht mehr gesehen habe. Vielleicht ist sie ja noch im Um- oder Ausbau, vielleicht überhaupt erst im Aufbau, aber seit beträchtlicher Zeit liegt sie da scheinbar einfach brach. Es ist wie ein totes Lebewesen auf dem Datenhighway und genauso unglaubwürdig staune ich. Selbst ein vergessener Blog hat noch mehr Leben in sich als ein niemals instanziertes Template: www.simflex.net

Resolution Tests

I now also did some quick resolution tests. I took a medium format slide film that I had shot not long ago and put it into the scanner. You can view it here (marked in red is the area that the following crops are taken from):

It's scanned from a Fujifilm Velvia 100 that I exposed in a Pentacon Six with the Zeiss Flektogon 50mm f/4 (I don't know the actual aperture or exposure time anymore). I chose this one because I think I got the exposure quite well, although I took it hand held and it might not be the sharpest example. The sign in the following 100% crops measures about 4.6mm on the slide. The text that you can read well is 2mm long and 0.2mm high.
First here's a rather unimpressive 100% crop of a scan at 1200dpi, which I chose to be my default resolution for archiving.

Now the question is how much better does it get when we increase the resolution? So,I scanned the whole frame at 4800dpi resulting in a 10k by 10k pixel image which equals to a whooping 100 Megapixels! Saved in JPEG with highest quality it takes 52MB.

Click here for the 100% crop at 4800dpi (700x700px)

There's quite a bit more detail now and the text becomes readable better. It's a pity some of the text didn't come forward and is beyond the resolution of the scanner. Maybe a highly professional scanner could reveal the text, I don't know, but keep in mind that the height of the small text is less than 0.1mm in size. It's possible that this was already beyond the optical resolution of the lens. Nevertheless, I took it to the maximum resolution of 6400dpi (above is interpolated) and also 48bit colour depth. Because this would have probably taken ages to scan, I just selected the tiny portion that you can see here:

Click here for the 100% crop at 6400dpi (1200x1200px)

If I'd scan the whole 6x6 frame at this setting the resulting file would be 1GB in size and feature a resolution of 176 Megapixels.

Ich habe soeben ein E-Mail an den Botschafter (WU Ken) der chinesischen Botschaft in Österreich geschickt (chinaemb_at at mfa dot gov dot cn), mit der Bitte ausländische Journalisten die Einreise in die Krisenregion wieder zu erlauben. Das E-Mail findet ihr unten, ich bitte euch alle der Botschaft in eurem Land zu schreiben und diese Forderung zu unterstützen (bitte die Namen entsprechend eintragen).

I've just sent a mail to the ambassador (WU Ken) of the Chinese embassy in Austria (chinaemb_at at mfa dot gov dot cn) with the plead to allow foreign journalists to reenter Lhasa and Tibet. Find below the mail. I beg you to send a similar mail to the ambassador in your country and support the plead (don't forget to substitute the respective names).

Dear Sir Ambassador AMBASSADOR_NAME,

I have followed the development around the riots in Lhasa with increasing concern. I am worried that the Chinese authority might exert an unnecessary amount of violence against the protestors, but I am especially worried that all foreign correspondents had to leave Tibet. News from this center of world attention is scarce. I beg you to raise your voice for the return of foreign journalists to Lhasa and Tibet so that China can take the opportunity to truly demonstrate a most professional and non-violent management of the riot.

Best regards,
YOUR_NAME

If you've got your own text, the better!

It strikes me how some pictures get a lot of views and when I look at which people viewed it, I'm surprised that I got about 9-11 views from ipernity members and a whooping 311 views from anonymous people. I guess this means that the photo must be linked somewhere, but I couldn't find any references neither on technorati nor in google. Or is it search engines that scan the pages?

The specific image I'm talking about is this:
www.ipernity.com/doc/donandre/1507447

How can I find out where the people are coming from or if this is linked somewhere?

This is the camera Dona brought into our collection. It was her very first camera which she got from her mother when she was about 10 years old. I've used it to cover the 1st november gatherings at our graveyard using an old cheap colour film. Later we loaded an old roll of Ilford HP5+ and took it to Prague as well as to skiing.

It's cheaply built and feels very light. The lens is fixed focal at 38mm and with a maximum aperture of f/4 which is set on the lens by moving a slider from sunny (probably f/16) over partly cloudy (probably f/8) to cloudy (f/4). You can set ISO film speed to be either 100 or 400 on a second slider (this probably switches between two exposure times). Focus is adjustable in 4 steps: head and shoulders, head and torso, whole person and mountains. That and a viewfinder that leaves you guessing a bit are all the controls that you have. It doesn't require batteries except for the flash.

I love to manually forward the film and that silent and short click when the shutter opens and the film is exposed. No waiting for Autofocus to finish, no waiting for the lens to extend, no waiting for the picture to be written to the card.

Following are some samples that I'd like to point you too:

The blurring of the person was actually a mistake as I forgot to adjust the focus resulting in a photo that I immediately fell in love with. DSLRs and modern cameras often prevent me from these accidents.
 

As I said framing is often a bit of a guess, but sometimes such small errors are what I think gives characters to these pictures (not to mention my uncle of course!)
 

Another one that I liked a lot from the one role that we carried to Prague, back home and to the ski ressort. 36 pictures are a lot more than we think when we are used to take a couple of 100 pictures from our memory cards and put them on the computer.

My conclusion: Cheap and with limited possibilities, probably bad per pixel sharpness, distortions, crude aperture and shutter speed settings, no light meter, no LCD and nothing that prevents you from making an error. A great camera.