mattblaze

mattblaze, 2 days ago

@JoBlakely "My wife handles all the family crimes."

mattblaze, 2 days ago

@JoBlakely @timo21 No, but there are so many of these you can be forgiven for confusing them. That was the one where Cruz took off to Cancun during a large-scale weather-related disaster in his state.

mattblaze, 3 days ago

NYC's IRT subway, opened in 1904, is powered by a 600 volt DC third rail running alongside the tracks. Power is fed to the system via a number of substations throughout the city, where high voltage AC is converted to the lower voltage DC used by trains. Until recently, this was done with electromechanical rotary converters (essentially a combination AC motor and DC generator). They have been supplanted by solid state rectifiers, but a few of the original rotary converters remain operational.

mattblaze, 3 days ago

It's worth noting that at the time the IRT opened and all this was built, commercial electrical power had only been available in NYC for about 20 years, and still wasn't available everywhere in the city. Much of the subway's infrastructure had to be invented, engineered, or perfected as it was being built.

mattblaze, 3 days ago

@heidilifeldman Not to mention that I'm sure Mrs Alito will be very pleased that her husband made her the bag holder on this.

mattblaze, 4 days ago

This was captured on a short hike with a small mirroless camera, 35mm lens, lightweight tripod, and enough neutral density for a roughly 30 second exposure.

Flowing water is a subject that lends itself to motion studies that reveal what our unaided eye can't see, controlled by exposure time. At 1/3000 sec, every drop of water freezes in place. At 30 seconds, we see smooth, cloud-like structures that obscure individual perturbations. Only at around 1/30 sec does the camera see what we do.

mattblaze, 4 days ago

This is a high resolution stitch of three captures with the Rodenstock 32mm/4.0 HR Digaron lens, yielding a 230 MP image with roughly the angle of view of a 14mm "full frame" rectilinear lens. The high resolution invites you to look closely for signs of life, but they remain elusive.

While this is literally a photo of the street, it's not a "street photo" at all. The empty nocturnal streetscape is completely devoid of life and human activity, though it hints at sometimes being a bustling place.

mattblaze, 4 days ago

So this was mostly a play on the concept of "street photography". The street is the literal subject, but everything about it - the absence of people or any depiction of street life, the use of a heavy, tripod-laden camera, the compositional formality - defies the conventions of that genre.

mattblaze, 4 days ago

Camera movements - shift in particular - make it relatively easy to make stitched images like this, since the lens perspective can remain fixed. You can simply stitch the adjacent frames together without any geometric correction. Panning the camera, on the other hand, alters the perspective between frames, and so requires geometrically transforming (at some cost of resolution) to make the frames line up correctly.

mattblaze, 5 days ago

Captured with a small full-frame camera and 21mm lens. A three second exposure smoothed waves and surf.

This was an exercise in tone, perspective, and convergence. The four major boundaries of the scene converge (approximately) near the center of the frame, forming a flattened X.

I composed this both with and without the driftwood in foreground, which interrupts the composition but, I decided, helpfully anchors the frame.

mattblaze, 5 days ago

The metadata for this image claims it was shot at f/16. That's wrong; it was more like f/2.5 or so. This was an artifact of the too-clever-by-half way Leica M cameras estimate the f stop. There's no mechanical link between the aperture ring and the camera body, so instead they estimate the f-stop with a separate light sensor that's compared with the brightness of the recorded image. This works reasonably well, except when you use an ND filter (as here), which confuses it to no end.

mattblaze, 5 days ago

@plantarum Right, no control of the aperture by the body. The Leicas can do Aperture-priority (where it varies the shutter speed), or Shutter priority (where it varies the sensitivity), but not Shutter-priority where it varies the aperture. But it's really designed for fully manual use.

mattblaze, 3 days ago

@jyrgenn no, it’s not tilted. There are rocks under the surf at left.

mattblaze, 3 days ago

@jyrgenn ah, no. That’s not actually the horizon. That’s a rocky barrier. You can (barely) see the actual horizon in the mist above it (most visible near the shore).

mattblaze, 6 days ago

STOP THE STICKER

mattblaze, 6 days ago

@ChuckMcManis @ai6yr Depending on whose yacht we're talking about, they might be able to do an even bigger public service by towing them out to sea and leaving them there.

mattblaze, 6 days ago

@violetblue I believe the Cue tests were distributed by Google and some other companies to employees.

mattblaze, 7 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

This was captured with the Rodenstock 50mm Digaron lens and about 13mm of vertical shift to maintain the geometry (but setbacks in the building design make it appear to converge toward the top).

The 42 story Cathedral of Learning houses offices and classrooms for the University of Pittsburgh. Completed in 1937, it took 11 years to construct. It remains the tallest academic building in the US.

mattblaze, 2 days ago

@peterhoneyman "My kid could do that", if your kid happens to be Rembrandt or Vermeer.