What to do

http://commencement.vassar.edu/2002/020526.kushner.html

Thom Hogan, on controlling ISO

"One thing people aren't catching that I need to explain a little further: why ISO boost manually and not by Auto ISO? Simple: image quality. Every time you boost ISO by a stop you lose a stop of dynamic range, which is a real image quality difference. Every time you lower shutter speed by a stop you might get an image quality difference, but generally if you're above a certain bar, you get none. Thus, if you're optimizing for image quality, you never boost ISO unless your shutter speed would compromise image quality. Most Auto-ISO systems still don't get this quite right, and it seems clear that the Reuters photographers are exerting manual control over ISO, which means that they're directly managing image quality."

from bythom.com, apropos of the PetaPixel story about the EXIF breakdown of reuters' top photos of 2012. 

Confusing Fall Warblers

http://www.migrationresearch.org/mbo/id/fall_warblers.html

Octopus texts

http://archiveofourown.org/works/299805

2008 City Council vote on term limits

There's a mayoral election next year, so for reference here's a link to a post with the roll call vote where the City Council decided to extend term limits so Mayor 1% could run for another term:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/council-to-debate-term-limits-change/

This is important.  While term limits are probably bad policy, the people of New York City had voted for them by referendum, and when Mayor 1% forced another referendum to try to repeal the term limits, the people overwhelmingly voted for them again.   So he bought off the City Council and got them to do it for him.

As far as I'm concerned, a "yes" vote on the term limit extension subverted the clearly expressed will of the people and permanently disqualifies those Council members from further public office.  Christine Quinn, I'm looking at you.

Krugman's note about where to find economic stats

I want a permanent link to these, I'll use this blog post for the time being.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/getting-employment-and-other-numbers/

Guerrilla System Administration

A Republican congressman from Staten Island says vandals broken into his campaign headquarters and installed Linux on all the computers.

Whole building stop-motion animation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG20nWOb7Ks&feature=player_embedded

(via PetaPixel)

500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art

This is from 2007, but I'd never seen it before:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUDIoN-_Hxs

(via Making Light)

Tripod links

This week, I'm thinking about tripods, since I'm going upstate next month for fall foliage. So I'm going to stick some article links here for later reference.

http://davidduchemin.com/2012/03/the-thing-about-travel-tripods/

http://www.adorama.com/alc/0013051/article/Buying-Guide-Five-Tripods-for-Travelers

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/548524-REG/Manfrotto_190CXPRO3_190CXPRO3_3_Section_Carbon_Fiber.html

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/560847-REG/Manfrotto_190XPROB_Tripod_Kit_Black.html

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/479927-REG/Manfrotto_190XPROB_190XPROB_Pro_Aluminum_Tripod.html

Photo mounting supplies

Preparing to mat some photographs; ordered supplies from Documounts, who seem good and were recommended on Luminous Landscape.

From a window

A post on PetaPixel talks about a South Korean photographer named Ahae who has taken a million pictures from his studio's window in the past two years. The results are actually pretty cool, check out his site. The "Birds" section alone is worth your time.

NEVER MIND THE FLYING CHUNKS OF CONCRETE, JUST GET THE DAMN PICTURE

So the Second Avenue Subway contruction had a minor mishap today:

This photo was taken by

...John Wilson, 69, of Wilmington, N.C., who was out exercising a new hip implant when the explosion happened.

Wilson, who underwent hip-replacement last week at the nearby Hospital for Special Surgery, was with his wife, Roberta, when they arrived at the scene just moments before the earth moved.

"We were right in the middle of it," Wilson told the Daily News. "We were crossing Second Ave. and a worker says, 'Would you like to see something really cool happen.' Then boom!

"I started feeling the dust and the debris hitting me," Wilson said. "The rocks were right in my face."

Wilson said he immediately started snapping away with his camera, taking dramatic photos of the sky-high blast.

(That's all from the Daily News story linked above.)

John Wilson is my new hero. I want to be like him when I grow up.

Blackburnian etc.

I see one of my favorite bird bloggers posted another of my sightings:
http://mariewinnnaturenews.blogspot.com/2012/08/blackburnian.html - "Ed Gaillard is very cool about his Blackburnian. If I had been reporting one I probably would have let myself go with CAPS and exclamation points!"

I guess I just like to make my reports concise and matter-of-fact.  But also, I didn't find the bird, a couple of other birders pointed her (pretty sure it was a female) out to me.

And I have a skewed perspective on account of not having birded very long.  I had a bunch of good Blackburnian sightings this Spring:



so maybe I don't fully appreciate what a good sighting this was.

I also had a Northern Parula, Redstart, Baltimore Oriole, and Northern Waterthrush today. The migrants are returning in force already, and it's not even the middle of August.

Bears Discover Beer

http://www.thelocal.no/page/view/bears-break-in-to-norway-cabin-drink-beer

Warblers returning south already

What do you know, somebody blogged a bird sighting I sent to NYSBirds-L:

http://mariewinnnaturenews.blogspot.com/2012/08/warblers-heading-south.html

At first I thought I had seen Yellow-Rumped Warblers, not Redstarts.  They were moving pretty fast and I got neither a photo nor a good look through binoculars, just a flash of yellow on the side. (I did get a good look at the Black-and_White Warblers).  But when I looked at the failed photos, I saw the tail of a Redstart moving out of the frame.

I saw a Black and White a week ago, Louisiana Waterthrush on July 21 and Northern Waterthrush on July 25.  These are all pretty early.

The Decisive Moment

Curiousity spotted while landing by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia15978b.html

A poem by Eric Van

I lost track of this excellent poem by Eric Van once before, so I'm sticking a link to it here:  http://ericmvan.livejournal.com/2407.html.

On Conferences

Excellent post about conferences on Mark Bernstein's site:  http://www.markbernstein.org/Aug12/OnConferences.html.  His site in general looks interesting.

Reduce, re-use, recycle

I wanted a place to put random links to stuff, and I noticed that I'd never got around to deleting this blog.  OK, then.