One day,
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I've had a Kiron macro zoom lense for quite a while. It's not a fancy sort, but it works nicely - especially for macro shots where I want good depth of field. Most macro lenses are close-focussing ones with a razor-thin depth of field. This beast works in macro mode at a fair distance, with the attendant advantages in depth of field. Granted, ( Read more... )

I was taking some low-light pictures with my DSLR a while back, and was having poor luck getting sharp focus. The wide aperture was exacerbating a problem I've noticed for a while. It also got me to thinking. I never had that problem with my old SLR, was my vision going or what? I really missed the split prism and microprism focusing aid in the ( Read more... )

I was watching TV the other night, and saw an ad about the face recognition in iPhoto 9. I have a copy, but hadn't been aware of that feature, so I went off to play with it. It's actually surprisingly good, and makes guesses of people's faces fairly well, even at odd orientation, partially obscured, bad lighting, poor focus, etc. A quick way to ( Read more... )

A while back, I bought a big, weird-looking tube on eBay. I had more-or-less forgotten about it until I came across it again whilst moving house. Curious, I endeavored to determine what it was. After some research, I found out it was a "finebeam tube" (Fadenstrahlröhre).In fact, my tube looks like the one in the picture, and bears the same part ( Read more... )

Take a picture of yourself right now. Don't fix your hair... just take a picture. Post that picture with no editing. Post these instructions with your picture.
Here's my entry. fizzygeek had just gotten home, and we both needed a shower. Then I went to read LJ. Taken with the iSight built into my shiny new laptop.

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Taking a page from shadowcaptain, I too tried photographing the lunar eclipse. I went with the 500mm ƒ/8 Nikkor mirror lense, which is essentially tantamount to bolting a small reflector telescope to the front of a camera (Fuji Finepix S3 Pro, in this case). I added a tripod and cable release.

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