The Coyote’s Compass – and the Disintegrator

The Coyote and the Disintegrator

The coyote could navigate with uncanny ease.  North, South, East, or West – the animal could find his way easily, picking his path better than a man with a map.  For eons, the masters of the animal universe could only ponder the means by which the coyote traveled.  Or, for that matter – the birds of the sky or the fish of the sea.  They all had the ability to move without effort, in the navigation of their life paths, never missing an exit ramp, never with the slightest bit of inaccuracy.  All that man could do about this, was ponder.

(This post is an add-on to the post about old vintage lenses).

Read about the Coyote

Note: the author is an amateur photographer, and does not possess a degree in medicine or nuclear physics.  All articles are his opinion, conjecture, or short night results.

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Rare Earth Plates for Breakfast?

Figure  1-3 :  A plate from the 20s, 30s, 40s.

I love to use old (vintage) camera lenses for my photography, but tend to stay away from the oldest ones.  Up through the sixties,  and (for some lens companies) – into the seventies and beyond – lenses were sometimes made with radioactive glass.  When this glass was marketed, the term “rare earths” was sometimes used to imply a glass additive or lens coating that contained thorium.

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Monochromatic Filter Fun – the White Towel Test

Figure 1:  The White towel test on an orange filter

So, I take my walks in parks and on green-ways, and I notice the way people dress.  The women wear bright colors often, and the guys wear the drab and dreary: gray, faded blue, and white.  I guess that’s par for the species for various reasons we won’t delve into, but I had the fleeting thought that these fellows would not look very  much different if they were photographed in black and white, versus color.

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Graphics Software for Linux

Application	ColorCorrection	Video	ARM Arch	Paint	Description
DarkTable	Yes	No	Prelim/Devel only?	Mask only?	Photo edit – Strong CC
Gimp	Yes	As Animation	Yes	Yes	Paint/Photo Edit
Inkscape	Some	No	Yes	Yes	Vector Graphics
DaVinci *	Yes	Yes	No	No	Film Finishing
Krita	Yes	As Animation	Yes	Yes	Strong Drawing, Also photo edit
Blender	Yes	As MJPEG, others	Yes	Yes	2D/3D Drawing, Video edit
Lightworks*	Yes	Yes	No	Mask only?	NLE for Video edit
Natron	Yes	Yes	No	?	Video clip ed, multi

Table 1: Some attributes of various linux graphics software entries ** 

Note that table 1 is not at all inclusive of every known graphics software project, but is an enumeration of a few projects that I am aware of and that have some substantial following of users. 

I won’t vouch for the absolute accuracy of the feature list, as I’ve used only one of these packages very intensively, and most of them not at all. I would advise to check out the features of the various projects, and make you own determination as to which may be a good choice to try. For the most part, the items are free, so there shouldn’t be much downside to a trial and error approach to this.

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Photography On the Cheap

Figure 1: The K5 is shown with a Tokina lens from the 1980s.

I started shooting with a bridge camera about two years ago (the FujiFilm s8600).   This was an attempt to bootstrap a photography interest of mine that had started in the early eighties (with an Olympus OM-1) – but which never managed to progress past the level of a novice, and hasn’t to this day.  There was always something more important to do, other than to teach myself to use a camera.  Now retired, I am devoting a lot of time to the task of catching up with the post millennium photography world.

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