Month: February 2007

vignetted sun




vignetted sun

Originally uploaded by paulbeard.

Test photo from a camera I have been working on. The vignetting is from a shutter I tried to add to it. The angle of view is so wide that you can see the edges of the aperture, even though it’s an inch across and 1/4 inch deep. So that came off today, to be replaced by a simpler one.

I think the exposure is pretty good, the development (1:100 Rodinal for an hour) yielded a good negative: all in all, I’m pleased with it. The camera is a cigar box, about f/80, and exposures are in the 15-30 second range for this time of day. Click through to Flickr to see another image from the same outing.

apropos

Alex Wellsung has strong words for Met patrons who are stayng away from Jenufa: “Professing enjoyment of opera, living in the tri state area, and not seeing this should be grounds for finding someone criminally insane.” One performance left.

I have no idea who Alex Wellsung is, nor do I have a clue or an opinion about Jenufa. I do think if we didn’t have a music critic named Wellsung, we would have to invent him.

links for 2007-02-15

links for 2007-02-14

color me stunned

cross-posted here

Glenn Greenwald – Salon quotes law professor Glenn Reynolds:

This has been obvious for a long time anyway, and I don’t understand why the Bush Administration has been so slow to respond. Nor do I think that high-profile diplomacy is an appropriate response. We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists, supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran, putting the mullahs’ expat business interests out of business, etc.

Basically, stepping on the Iranians’ toes hard enough to make them reconsider their not-so-covert war against us in Iraq. And we should have been doing this since the summer 2003. But as far as I can tell, we’ve done nothing along these lines.

What can you add to that? A law professor at a state-funded university is advocating the assassination of Iranian scientists.

You’d think a law professor would understand that this go against Executive Order 12333 – United States Intelligence Activities which was put in effect by a Republican president:

No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.

Amazing.