A Day for Minorities |
"A day for minorities" was arranged by the local ABF (Worker's Education Union), and I was invited.
"A day for minorities" was arranged by the local ABF (Worker's Education Union), and I was invited.
Close up of the Husby rune stone, listed as U74 in the catalogs. It was carved in the 11th century by Visäte, a well-known rune carver.
C/2011 L4 PANSTARRS seen over Hästa Gård from Granholmstoppen. As an aside, this was the first use of the Nikon 35mm f/1.8 DX in anger in astrophotography. It performed admirably.
The 70-200mm f/2.8 is a professional fast telephoto zoom lens. It does what it is supposed to do, and does it well.
Another hafla at Layali. For this one I had rented Nikon's monster 70-200mm / 2.8 VR II. The extra one-two stops of aperture really mattered, as I could shoot at 1/100 s at ISO 1600. I'll write more about this lens later. For now it is sufficient to say that it does what it is supposed to do, and does it well.
With snow, wind and the coldest month of March in many years, what better way to celebrate the start of spring than with lots of fire?
Moon over Kista. With the sky being clear, I figured I wanted a shot of it and Kista Science Tower. After som checking with Stellarium and Google Earth I figured out the time and place to be. But the big problem turned out to be the HDR merge. The moon moves, and the bright parts are as bright as mid-day light, while the dark parts are as dark as a star-lit night without atmosphere. This means that you have an exposure range of 25 seconds down to 1/160th of a second, or a 12-stop range. With two stops between shots, you're looking at seven shots. Say 10 seconds between shots to dial in the new exposure and wait for the camera to stop shaking. Then the exposures: 25 seconds, 6 seconds, and then some at 1 second or less. A total of 100 seconds, give or take. During that time, the moon has moved a distance across the sky almost equivalent to its own diameter. The overlap between the first and last HDR exposure is basically none. So I went to Hugin, stacked and fused the images, and the merged it with a single exposure of the ground. Here are the results.
This may well be the last review of this lens being written, because I can't think of anyone who hasn't already gone out and bought one.
While the American hero may be an orphan, his destiny is to be number one. The Soviet hero's destiny, orphan or not, is to lose the race and be number two - then die, be forgotten and erased from history by the politburo.
Stockholm is the home of four graffiti pieces that have been considered for national heritage listing. Highway by Still Heavens Only Force (SHOF), Red Dragon by Disey and Ziggy, Fascinate by Circle and Tarik - and this one, Midsummer Madness by Akay and Spade. I've run into the name Akay previously, when I went to take a look beneath St. Eriksbron in 2009, so I wasn't all that surprised to find out that he had left his mark among the top four graffiti pieces of Stockholm.
An issue I haven't touched on when executing work units in parallel - for example, in a work set, is how to handle exceptions.
What is more fun than to build your own rocket, crew it with a trio of little green men, and launch it into outer space? Not many things, if you ask me.
A pattern that I've found very useful is to offload input and output on background tasks.
Going past Fittja I ended up in Alby. I originally thought I'd keep going all the way to Norsborg, but in the end I couldn't be bothered to find a crossing of the E4 freeway that swoops down between Alby and Hallunda. Some interesting features are the Golden Rules of Alby and the house of Tobias Fischer. Tobias Fischer is a photographer, so I'm betting on his house being photogenic isn't a coincidence. |