Morning Schmoe and Lycra Spandexy Bend the Knee to Trump

photog Current Events, Trump , ,

I guess we all should have seen this coming.

Is there any lower form of life than Morning Schmoe?  The answer is a resounding no.  After attacking Trump for eight years he crawled on his belly and did obeisance.  And he even dragged his half-witted ditz along for moral support.

What’s next?  Will Keith Olbermann be the next lefty hack to wash up on the shore of Mar a Lago begging for forgiveness?  Has word gotten out that this is the only way to escape from right-wing death squads?  How about Rosie O’Donnell?

I don’t know.  The whole thing is so embarrassing.  The next thing you know Bruce Springsteen and Robert DeNiro will be seen wearing MAGA sweatshirts.  No self respect.

Calibrating a Focus Bracket with the Sony 90mm Macro Lens on the A7 IV

photog Camera Reviews, Photo Study, Photography, Photography Reviews , , , ,

TomD brought up a lot of good points about the limitations and vagaries of focus stacking so I tried to get a better handle on the mechanics of the settings used.

And when in need of a handy dandy close up subject I hauled out my extremely dead tarantula spider.  He has the benefit of being a rather large macro subject.  So I arranged the camera on a tripod at the minimum focal distance and set the bracket spacing to 4 out of 10 and selected 125 frames.  After the end I measured the length of the spider that was in focus in the bracket.  It came to about 2.5 inches.  Now this is a ballpark because there was an angle to the camera.  but this gives a decent idea of how many shots are needed to cover a depth of field.

Here is the first bracket frame

Here’s the last (125th) frame

Here is the stacked composite

And finally here is a photo taken from the same distance at a very small aperture (f\18) as a comparison.

Now this stack took 50 minutes to crank out on my laptop.  Is it worth the time and effort?  I guess that’s a personal choice.  But I’m kind of enjoying playing around with a new technique.  And that’s probably the nerd in me showing through.

 

Update:

TomD commented:

As a lifelong certified arachnophobe, 2.5” inches is entirely too big (by at least an order of magnitude) for a live spider to be.

Thanks for the experiment! Enlightening!

Even with 4 steps/per frame x 125 frames, or 500 steps, it still didn’t get the abdomen. So 500 steps only covered around 1.75”?

That’s extremely unintuitive and approaching unusable.

As I said in an earlier post, the software that I played with at the camera club would have the entire object with 8-10 exposures.

Maybe that’s more a function of the lens than the software. I’ve done a lot of macro work using several lenses and noticed that macro lenses with a very close focus all have a razor thin usable depth of field. I wonder what would happen if you took a good prime lens in the 85+mm range, moved it back and tried the same experiment at something like f8?

You would have to crop in to get the same image size but I’ve noticed that ou A7IV’s can be cropped quite a ways and still have great IQ’s (image quality).

Using the setup specs of your experiment, I’d say that the upper dof limit is in the inch range.

photog replied:

Tom, I’m going to play around with this function.  I want to see what I can do with it.  It seems like an interesting tool that I might find some good applications for.  But I can see that it might not have any compelling uses for most people.

Alright Then, Bald headed Women

photog Current Events, Trump ,

Cat Ladies are scared.  They can’t tell who voted for Trump.  They say they want Kamala voters to wear a blue bracelet to identify them to each other.  And they want to shave their heads.  And they want to wear COVID masks.  Well, that’s a lot of stuff.  So, I guess there is potentially 48% of white women out there who might start walking around with shaved heads, surgical masks and blue bracelets.

I’ve gotta say, that’s a pretty horrendous situation.  Most of these blue-haired cat ladies aren’t the most attractive bunch.  As a group they’re also pretty grouchy to start with and now after the election they’re going on TikTok and Instagram and yelling a lot and threatening to stop having sex.  And that’s fine.  I don’t think anyone is going to insist they have sex.  In fact, for a lot of them it might be for the best.  I’m no expert on modern relationships but I think, for the most part, most men prefer women with hair.  And a lot of them prefer a woman who doesn’t hate men.  Maybe not all but a lot of them.

And even for us who don’t plan to have sex with random former-blue-haired bald women, we still have to see them walking around with their bald heads.  It’s not great.  I mean you get used to women having hair.  It’s going to be like some kind of dystopian science fiction story with these ugly bald women wearing masks and glaring at us without blue bracelets.  And do you think that the blue hair dye will end up dyeing their heads blue too?  I don’t think I could deal with that.  Bald blue-headed angry women wearing surgical masks.  It’s a bit much.

As a man with short hair I can say definitively that a shaved head makes living in the northeast more difficult.  As bald people well know the human body loses a lot of heat from the head and this is exacerbated by baldness.  I don’t know if these women are aware.  Maybe they’ll reconsider.  I’ll bet a lot of them don’t even have hats anymore.  Well, these particular women probably have those pink hats from their marches back in 2017.  I guess they could repurpose those to keep their bald heads warm in the winter.  That wouldn’t be so bad.  So maybe this won’t be so bad.  I wonder if we could persuade them to wear the hats indoors too.  We could compliment them on how nice the hats make them look.  You know compliment them, respectfully.  Not hit on them or anything.  Not enough to get them thinking about sex again.  Just enough to keep those hats on their big bald blue heads.

As I said, a lot of these women are very angry.  They keep talking about attacking and shooting Trump voters.  That’s not good.  I mean, who would want to be punched or shot by an angry bald-headed woman?  I know I don’t.  It would be embarrassing to admit.

Maybe I should get me one of those blue bracelets.  How much could it cost; five, six bucks?  Of course, if it’s a lot more maybe I can make on out of blue electrical wire.  I’ll go to Home Depot and buy a spool of it and braid it into a bracelet.  Well, that sounds like a plan.

Honestly, we live in difficult times.  Just when you think that you’ve conquered the worst problems something new comes along.  Like nose rings.  I was always freaked out when I saw people, especially women with nose rings.  I always wondered if when their nose was running did it drip down the nose ring?  And then I thought maybe that was a workable situation.  When they had a cold, they could attach a length of tubing to the bottom of the nose ring and let the snot run off into a bottle or something.  I thought of patenting this idea but then I figured some nose ring wearer probably already thought of it.  So, I didn’t.

Well, the world marches on.  Alright then, bald headed women.

Guest Contributor – TomD – 17NOV2024 – Photo – Focus Stacking Issues

photog Guest Contributors, Photo Study, Photography, TomD , ,

Tom | Flickr

TomD

Yesterday, I experimented some and found what I consider the Achilles heel of the method. This isn’t a factor for inanimate objects but outdoor nature photography becomes difficult to say the least. I was trying to shoot a clump of red berries in a bush and then a flower (this is Florida)> There was no detectable wind the the 1/4 mph (or whatever) was just enough to move the subject 1/8” to 1/16”, just barely. That would have had little to no effect in regular photography but it totally ruled out stacked images for any purpose. That + the sheer length of time the subject has to remain motionless is hard in the wild. For my initial experiments, I was doing just 25 images with a 2 sec interval. That’s a life time in some circumstances but a bunch of articles recommended 100!

This is different from the focus stacking that i learned when I was in a camera club about 15 years ago. Then the shooting formula was still on a tripod, you would focus the camera on the nearest point you wanted, then the furthest and then input the number of steps that you want. Typically, it was along the line of 5 to 10 intervals, max.

The major downside was that the camera had to be tethered to and controlled by a computer. And the software was expensive.

At any rate, it looks as if this latest technique is limited to purely static subjects. But so to is HDR but to a much lessor extent. The most images you need in HDR is 5 and my camera will whip those out in less than a second. So you have some latitude.

Daydream Believer

photog Current Events, Trump , , ,

I was working on the outline for my book and I need to add about 50,000 words to the present length.  Luckily, I have a “women and children in danger” scenario that hasn’t even been started yet so there’s 25,000 words right there.  But the other thing I thought of has to do with the wrap up of the story.  Our heroes have survived a direct nuclear attack by the crazed, cowardly POTUS and have retaliated by physically undermining the headquarters of all the centers of power in Washington (White House, Capitol, Pentagon and all the HQ buildings of the security agencies including their data storage infrastructure nationwide). Basically, everyone in those building fall hundreds of feet to their death underground.  In addition, the good guys manage to tunnel under and hijack a bunch of ICBMs out of their silos thus preventing potential future retaliation.

So, the wrap-up has to be a conference between our heroes (or their representatives) with the federal and state leaders about a modus vivendi that will prevent any more bloodshed and allow for more permanent arrangements to be negotiated.  And the demand that the negotiators would make would be for all the rights that the Bill of Rights guaranteed them be restored without question or exception forever.  Now that could easily chew up 30,000 words.

While I was thinking about that, it got me thinking about reality.  Like, what would be the best outcome of Trump decapitating the Deep State and neutering all of the agencies that make our lives miserable?  Obviously, it would be for him to invite the Supreme Court to rule against all of the affirmative action and other unconstitutional mandates that strip away our rights and then use the Supreme Court’s decision to shut down all of the agencies and departments that spend all their time making these regulations.

Can you imagine if all the federal employees who monitor and threaten corporations to hire more girl bosses suddenly had no permission to do such things?  And then extend that to all of the other protected classes.  Imagine if a company could just hire who they wanted to based on nothing more than the fact that they considered someone the best choice?  Why that would be revolutionary.  And imagine if all the corporations could close down their HR departments and allow managers to hire their employees themselves?  Think of all the unemployed blue-haired cat ladies!  Think of the end of HR sponsored struggle sessions around gay pride week and rainbow flag decorations.  No more new acronyms like LGBTQIA and BiPOC and DEI and no more seminars on toxic masculinity, white privilege and hate speech.  And no more stupid slogans like “diversity is our strength.”  From now on everyone doing their damn jobs is our strength.

And after thinking about that I was sitting there with this stupid smile on my face for like five minutes.  And, of course, I knew it was just a ridiculous pipe dream.  But what a beautiful dream it was.  And really, it was completely within the bounds of what the Supreme Court could do.  And it was completely within the authority of what the President could do to respond to just such a Supreme Court decision.

It was completely logical and also completely impossible.  But it was the most beautiful dream I’ve had in a while.  It reminded me of a dream I had a few months ago where I imagined Donald Trump winning the 2024 election with a mandate and a congressional majority behind him.  It was dream like that.