Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

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Three is a magic number.

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020

I really enjoy Rachel By the Bay’s writing, but I specifically wanted to bookmark this: “My list of magic numbers for your turkey day enjoyment“.

A couple of personal additions (hey, if Rachel can add C-64 and VIC-20 magic numbers, I can add these):

POKE 65495,0: On the old Radio Shack Color Computer, this sped up the CPU. Specifically, according to the Intertubes: “POKE 65495,0 would cause the processor to run at double speed ( 1.795 MHz ) when accessing instructions in ROM and Normal Speed ( 0.895 MHz ) when accessing DRAM.” It also messed up the timing for tape input and output, so you had to disable it before saving or loading from tape. POKE 65494,0 would return the system to normal.

POKE 65497,0: This switched the processor fully to double speed for all memory access, including DRAM. It also disabled video: you basically just got snow on your monitor until you reset the system with POKE 65496,0.

Edited to add #1:

A spot in the middle of the ocean that shows up on a map and, once zoomed WAY out, shows Africa to the north and east of it is 0 degrees north, 0 degrees west, and it’s what happens when someone treats zero as null or vice-versa in a mapping/location system. See also: Null Island.

Worth keeping in mind. For OPSEC purposes, I set the EXIF location data in many of the photos I take (especially firearms photos around the house) to 0.000000 north and 0.000000 west.

Posted in Bookmarks, Geek, Photography | 2 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 223

Sunday, November 8th, 2020

Science Sunday!

This is an interesting intersection of two things I’m interested in: space history and photography.

“How did NASA get those great film shots of Apollo and the Shuttle?”

Bonus: I’ve touched on Harold “Doc” Edgerton previously, but this is a nice tribute and explanation of his work from MIT.

Bonus #2: “Quicker ‘n a Wink”, Doc in 1940.

I’m not going to include them here, but if you search YouTube, you can find some videos that emulate Dr. Edgerton’s photos with modern equipment.

My reason for not including them here is that they do require purchasing some equipment that you probably do not already have: while the price for the additional equipment in one video is reasonable (slightly more than $50) I don’t want to be seen as endorsing the products.

(And I realize that may seem kind of hypocritical for someone who throws around Amazon affiliate links like candy. What can I say: man’s got to have some standards, even if they are low ones.)

Posted in Geek, History, Photography | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 153

Sunday, August 30th, 2020

Science Sunday!

Today, a compilation of shorter videos for once. First up: yes, it is a TED talk. But it is also James Randi. As I’ve said previously, I consider debunking pseudoscience (including “psychic” frauds) to be legitimately science.

Bonus: from the Periodic Videos channel, a short video on anatoxin-a. Anatoxin-a is also known by another name: “Very Fast Death Factor“.

Bonus #2: from the MIT Science Reporter, “Underwater Photography”. I picked this one because it features another one of my heroes, Harold “Doc” Edgerton.

Posted in Geek, History, Photography | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 3, 2020.

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020

Wes Unseld, NBA center.

Over 13 seasons with the Baltimore, Capital and Washington Bullets (now the Washington Wizards), Unseld’s teams went to the N.B.A. finals four times and won the league’s title in 1978 over the Seattle SuperSonics. Unseld was named the series’ M.V.P.

There are only two players who have been named MVP and rookie of the year in the same season. The other one is Wilt Chamberlain.

Pat Dye, Auburn football coach.

Elsa Dorfman, photographer. She specialized in taking portraits with the giant 20×24 Polaroid camera, about which I have written previously.

By way of Hacker News (and I don’t think the WSJ link is going to work for many people): Irene Triplett. Ms. Triplett was 90 years old, and was the last person still receiving a Civil War pension.

According to the WallyJ, which I can read but can’t link here, her father (Moses Triplett) started out fighting for the Confederacy, then defected to the Union side in 1863. He married a woman named Elda Hall in 1924, had Irene Triplett in 1930 (he was 83, his wife was 34), and died in 1938 at 92.

Her pension was apparently $73.13 a month, though she received other benefits as a ward of the state. In addition, “…a pair of Civil War buffs visited and sent her money to spend on Dr. Pepper and chewing tobacco, a habit she picked up in the first grade.”

Posted in Art, History, Obits, Photography, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 21, 2020.

Saturday, March 21st, 2020

Kenny Rogers. Borepatch.

He was an avid photographer as well. He published two volumes of his work: “Kenny Rogers’ America” (1986), an assortment of photos of national landmarks and other places of interest, and “Your Friends and Mine” (1987), a collection of portraits of fellow celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson.

…

Mr. Rogers was also a successful entrepreneur. His best-known enterprise was Kenny Rogers Roasters, a chain of chicken restaurants he opened with John Y. Brown Jr., the former governor of Kentucky and chief executive of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Opened in 1991, the chain — which was, among other things, the subject of a memorable episode of “Seinfeld” — closed in the United States 20 years later but has continued to prosper overseas, particularly in Southeast Asia.

Boris Yaro, LAT photographer. He famously took multiple photos of Robert Kennedy immediately after the shooting.

There’s another story about Mr. Yaro’s photography: that one involves a suicidal man and Muhammad Ali, but you’ll have to read the obit for that one.

Posted in History, Music, Obits, Photography | Comments Closed

Gratuitous gun porn (#6 in a series)

Friday, December 27th, 2019

You know that guy who says “Nostalgia is a moron“? And has bought several guns because of his childhood nostalgia?

Remember that other guy who says that he thought the Remington XP-100 in .221 Fireball was the coolest gun in the world…when he was six years old?

And that guy who has this thing for small-bore handguns?

Remington XP-100 in .221 Remington Fireball. Burris pistol scope.

Purchased from a fellow S&WCA member at the 2019 Symposium (though we went out into the parking garage to make the transaction, rather than doing it in the exhibit hall/dealer’s room: and he was also a Texas resident, so this was a fully legal private sale). There was a discussion on the forum about grail guns, I mentioned this as one of mine, and he reached out to me and said he had one in his safe that wasn’t being used…

He made me what I thought was a very good deal, threw in 50 rounds of handloads and 50 rounds of empty brass, and was very flexible when it came to payment arrangements. Thank you, S&WCA member who shall remain nameless here to protect his privacy!

Posted in Guns, Photography | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 12, 2019.

Thursday, September 12th, 2019

T. Boone Pickens. Oklahoma State football hardest hit.

Diet Eman has passed away at 99.

Ms. Eman, at 20, was living with her parents and bicycling to work at the Twentsche Bank in The Hague when, in May 1940, the Germans, hours after Hitler had vowed to respect Dutch neutrality, invaded the Netherlands. Her sister’s fiancé was killed on the first of five days of fighting. (A brother died later in a Japanese prison camp.)
Some of her neighbors, fellow churchgoers, argued that for whatever reason, God in his wisdom must have willed the German invasion. But Ms. Eman — herself so deeply religious that she would leave assassinations, sabotage and, for the most part, even lying to others — could find no justification for such evil.
She and her boyfriend, Hein Seitsma, joined a Resistance group (coincidentally called HEIN, an acronym translated as “Help each other in need”). They began by spreading news received on clandestine radios from the British Broadcasting Corporation, then smuggling downed Allied pilots to England, either by boat across the North Sea or more circuitously through Portugal.

…

A plea for help by Herman van Zuidan, a Jewish co-worker of Ms. Eman’s at the bank, prompted her Resistance group to focus on stealing food and gas ration cards, forging identity papers and sheltering hundreds of fugitive Jews.
She said of the German occupiers, “It was beyond their comprehension that we would risk so much for the Jews.”
Ms. Eman delivered supplies and moral support to one apartment in The Hague that in late 1942 housed 27 Jews in hiding. The walls were paper thin. Crying babies and even toilet flushing risked raising the suspicions of neighbors, who knew only that a woman had been living there alone.

Ms. Eman was captured at one point and briefly imprisoned in a concentration camp: she managed to convince the Germans she was an innocent housemaid who knew nothing. Her fiance was also captured and was killed at Dachau.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan hailed Ms. Eman in a letter for risking her safety “to adhere to a higher law of decency and morality.” In 1998, Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, granted her the title of Righteous Among the Nations, given to non-Jews for risking their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust; she was cited for her leadership in sheltering them. In 2015, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, during a stop in Grand Rapids on a promotional tour for Dutch businesses, lauded Ms. Eman as “one of our national heroes.” (She became a United States citizen in 2007.)

It has been a bad week for photographers.

Robert Frank, noted for “The Americans”.

“The Americans” challenged the presiding midcentury formula for photojournalism, defined by sharp, well-lighted, classically composed pictures, whether of the battlefront, the homespun American heartland or movie stars at leisure. Mr. Frank’s photographs — of lone individuals, teenage couples, groups at funerals and odd spoors of cultural life — were cinematic, immediate, off-kilter and grainy, like early television transmissions of the period. They would secure his place in photography’s pantheon. The cultural critic Janet Malcolm called him the “Manet of the new photography.”
But recognition was by no means immediate. The pictures were initially considered warped, smudgy, bitter. Popular Photography magazine complained about their “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons, and general sloppiness.” Mr. Frank, the magazine said, was “a joyless man who hates the country of his adoption.”

Neil Montanus. He worked in several different areas of photography, including underwater and microscopic. But he was perhaps most famous as one of Kodak’s leading “Colorama” photographers: he took 55 out of the 565 photos, which were displayed in Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal between 1950 and 1990.

Every weekday, 650,000 commuters and visitors who jostled through the main concourse could gaze up at Kodak’s Coloramas, the giant photographs that measured 18 feet high and 60 feet wide, each backlit by a mile of cold cathode tubing, displaying idealized visions of postwar family life — not to mention the wonders of color film.

I kind of wish “On Taking Pictures” was still doing new shows, as I figure Jeffery Saddoris and Bill Wadman would have a lot to say about these two.

Finally: Daniel Johnston, singer/songwriter and Austin icon. Don’t have much to say: for me, he fell into the same category as Roky Erickson.

Posted in Heroism, History, Music, Nazis, Obits, Photography | Comments Closed

Black Hat/DEFCON 27 links: August 13, 2019.

Tuesday, August 13th, 2019

I had a lot of trouble finding this on the site, but: the DEFCON 27 media server is here.

I’ve got to wrap this up for now, as my lunch hour is almost over. I may try to do a second post tonight, if I find enough additional material to justify one. Otherwise, please share, enjoy, comment, and thank any presenters whose work you found particularly enjoyable or valuable.

Posted in DEFCON, DEFCON 27, Photography, Radio | Comments Closed

Gratuitous gun porn (#5 in a series)

Sunday, July 28th, 2019

I finally have my Scout rifle set up almost the way I want it.

Savage Model 11 Scout, Burris 2-7×32 Scout Scope. Ching Sling from Andy’s Leather. Scout Rifle Study by Richard Mann.

(more…)

Posted in Guns, Photography | 2 Comments »

Photo of the day.

Wednesday, May 22nd, 2019

Technically, this is a couple of days old, and I’m not going to reproduce it here, out of respect for the NYT‘s intellectual property rights.

But if you ever wanted to see a large photo of Thomas Harris (yes, the Hannibal guy) holding a live possum named Bruce…here you go.

Posted in Books, Mammals, Photography | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 11, 2019.

Thursday, April 11th, 2019

Ed Westcott passed away at the end of March. He was 97.

Mr. Westcott was the photographer at Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project era. Note I said “the photographer”: Mr. Westcott was the only person authorized to take photos at Oak Ridge. (There were also photographers at Los Alamos and Hanford.)

Thousands of his negatives were stored at Oak Ridge, and then at the National Archives in Washington, before they were declassified years later.
He also developed aerial reconnaissance photos of the devastation wrought by the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as armed guards waited outside his darkroom.

Kind of related: I got curious about the Cemestos houses, did some DuckDuckGoing, and found this piece from McSweeney’s. I know, but I actually thought this was pretty good: Anne Wheeler’s a charming writer, and I’d love to hit some nuclear tourism spots with her.

Posted in Obits, Photography | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 20, 2019.

Wednesday, February 20th, 2019

Don Newcombe, noted pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

An imposing right-hander, at 6 feet 4 inches and 225 pounds, with an overpowering fastball, Newcombe claimed a string of achievements: National League rookie of the year in 1949; four-time All-Star; the league’s Most Valuable Player in 1956, when he also won the first Cy Young Award as baseball’s top pitcher. Moreover, he was the first black pitcher to start a World Series game.

…

While Newcombe was proud of his accomplishments as a pitcher, he was gratified as well to have played a role in the civil rights struggle by helping to shatter modern baseball’s racial barrier after the arrival of the Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson and catcher Roy Campanella.
He once said that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King came to his house in the weeks before his assassination in 1968 and told him, “I would never have made it as successfully as I have in civil rights if it were not for what you men did on the baseball field.”

Also among the dead: Karl Lagerfeld, fashion designer.

Guy Webster, album cover photographer.

Mr. Webster’s work with the Rolling Stones — including the photo for the bucolic cover of the United States release of the anthology “Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass)” (1966) — began with an unusual offer in 1965 from Andrew Loog Oldham, their producer and manager: Take photographs, but don’t expect to be paid because it’s an honor simply to work with the band.
“And I said, ‘Well, it’s an honor for you that I take these pictures,’ ” Mr. Webster said at the Annenberg event. “He paid me for one album cover. Three of them came out during the years using my photographs.”

For Exposure, call your office, please.

Posted in Music, Obits, Photography, Sports | Comments Closed

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