Forum: General Photography
2 Days Ago
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Quad Graphics had a large printing plant in Saratoga Springs that employs about 400 people. It prints magazines such as Sports illustrated, Look, Time Newsweek, People, Wired, Us etc. Dozens of them. Also the Cabelas Catalog and many other publications. If you read any of those magazines the proofs and pringing plates to make them were imaged on equipment that I serviced. They were even a branch of the US Postal Service and mailed the magazines directly to their subscribers from there, They are shutting the plant down over the next few months. I spent 17 years providing field service for Creo, and Kodak equipment installed there.
FWIW I still prefer the printed page.
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Forum: Pentax K-1 & K-1 II
03-07-2024, 11:09 AM
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As pert of eclipse prep, I tried out my new 86mm solar filter on my D FA 150-450 with my K1-II. The more I practice, the more I am sure that the day will be cloudy. :o
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Forum: General Talk
03-04-2024, 04:22 PM
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An 86mm solar filter from Seymour solar. For my Pentax D FA 150-450 lens. This should ensure that April 8 will be plenty cloudy around here.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
02-28-2024, 10:43 AM
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Too old to build one now. If I was going to get into medium or large format B&W I would probably get one but there is no longer the large selection of B$W films, developers and papers available so it may get a bit frustrating. B&W photography is much harder to master than color but it is much more satisfying when it works out.
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Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
02-25-2024, 06:31 AM
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Back in 1999 when I started my job as a Field Engineer supporting imaging equipment for the printing industry my largest customer had a 20 drive RAID that could hold an astonishing 64GB of data!!!!!
My first personal computer was a TRS-80 Model 4 that has two 184Kb 5 1/4" floppy drives and 64K of RAM. I added another 64K of RAM but since the processor could only handle 64K of RAM the addition memory was used as a RAM bank . ie, another drive. SSD's are not all that new. The computer cost me about $2,000 ($6,200 today) in 1983. It was a lot of money, but I learned a lot from with that computer. For another $2,000 I could have gotten a hard drive that was the size of one of the old IBM PC's that contained 5Mb of storage!!!:eek: I wish I Still had it.
FORTRAN is an awesome language. Name another language program that can be looked and understood by someone with no programming experience.
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Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
02-24-2024, 05:40 PM
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Back in the mid 1980's I was a supervisor in the Clinical Products division of Kodak. At the time they were developing the Ektachem 750 Blood Analyzer. One of the contract programmers was a middle age gent who used to work for NASA in the 1960's. He was complaining how sloppy programming was getting as computer memory expanded. He said that he wrote a program that was collecting data form 5 different satellites. processing it all and printing it out on 5 different printers. One printer for each satellite. It was doing this with all of 24K of RAM.
His stories were very interesting. The programmers would often negotiate amongst themselves for a to see who might have a few bytes of memory that they did not need.
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Forum: General Talk
02-23-2024, 06:33 AM
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I had some sort of PDA back in the day. It was a small flip up model with a keyboard. IT was awesome.............until it died and all my data disappeared. After that I went back to, and never abandoned my paper daily planner until I retired some 15 years later. Used it to maintained contacts, mileage and expenses. Never failed me.
YES!!!!! The old Weston Master V meter counts.
My 200 year old hand forged cross peen hammer that came out of an old carriage makers shop in Avon, NY still works great too.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
02-21-2024, 12:19 PM
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It is no more art than a painting of the eclipse would be. Of a portrait painting or even a scenic painting. I do not like the term artist. There are craftsmen and craftswomen who sometime create a work that raises to the level of art.
I firmly believe that the advent of photography did free up generations of painters and sculptors to explore new ways of using their crafts. Without photography we would probably not have cubism, impressionism or the other genre of painting or sculpture we have today.
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Forum: General Photography
02-15-2024, 09:15 AM
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To see if one may benefit you, take a regular rifle with a scope on it. Simply look down it and see how steady you are while standing (the offhand position). If you can hold it reasonably steady then it should work for you. To steady yourself, take the elbow of the arm you are using for your trigger finger and tuck it into you chest. You do not want that elbow sticking out there like a chicken wing. Plus it helps to lean into it a bit and have a good stance.
If you are a good offhand shot with a rifle one of these may be the way to go for you. If you want to get really good at photographing birds in flight go out an start shooting sporting clays. Two benefits. You increase tracking skills and there is just something innately satisfying about smacking the heck out of those clays. Very relaxing.
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Forum: Pentax K-3 & K-3 II
02-10-2024, 06:48 AM
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All of Canada needs to stop using bilingual road signs until Quebec Province, who demanded them in the first place, uses them too.
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Forum: Film Processing, Scanning, and Darkroom
02-08-2024, 01:11 PM
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When the roll coating machines could run 24 hours a day, 7 day a week they were extremely efficient. Nowadays this is no longer happening. I know that in the mid 1980's, every time a film roll coating line was shut down at Kodak, it cost $7,000,000 to restart. Not sure what they are doing today but film emulsion manufacturing and coating is an extremely complex operation. Then after that the film has to sit and continue to ripen for several weeks and the chemical reactions completed. This is usually over a 6 week to 2 month period.
Modern reversal films have some 23 different layers in them. All within the thickness of a sheet of cellophane wrapper. B&W film is much less complex. but still needs to ripen before it meet specs.
I have actually made a B&W film emulsion from scratch. Wound up with an ISO of about 100. It was a process that took several days in the chemistry lab at college stretched out over two weeks. Lots of letting the emulsion sit and do it's thing over several days. Ours was so good that my lab partner and I won top prize. A case of beer!!!
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Forum: Pentax K-1 & K-1 II
02-06-2024, 08:44 PM
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For some reason I like the graffiti. Adds a bit of color.
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Forum: General Talk
02-06-2024, 07:57 PM
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What is fun, is that different colors of the spectrum have different indexes of refraction. That is the cause of things like chromatic aberration etc. Mirrors do not have this problem. As my physics teacher in high school said. Think of the little blue Volkswagen and the big red firetruck. Both hit a brick wall. The little blue Volkswagen has it's path deflected much more than the big red firetruck. That is why the sky is blue. This makes lens design so much fun. Especially in the days before computer aided design.
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Forum: Pentax K-1 & K-1 II
02-06-2024, 07:40 PM
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It was added in post processing. I use SilkyPix 10 Developer Pro.
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Forum: Pentax K-1 & K-1 II
02-06-2024, 02:09 PM
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I decided to take a few photos today. With no snow the landscape is pretty blah, but I decided to give it a go anyway.
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Forum: Vintage Cameras and Equipment
01-29-2024, 08:56 AM
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A few from glass plates I dug out of a trash bin at Eastman Kodak in the late 1980's. There is a photo with a calendar showing March 1918 so they are about 100 years old. I used to get old Daguerreotypes from antique stores for about $0.50 a piece back in the olden days of my youth. I just gave them to my uncle who was interested in them.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
01-25-2024, 08:09 AM
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What do you call it if you use an analogue system like film? Analscoping? Wait!. They make one of those already. :eek:
My Pentax 10x43 Z-Series ZD ED Binoculars are tier one optics. Their field of view is not as wide and the really high expense binoculars, but the image is every bit as good. At Yellowstone I could not separate my wife from them. We did a lot of scanning the far off areas looking for wolves and bears. Found some too. This should be a great spotting scope. Scanning the mountain tops along the road that goes to the NE entrance is a great place for this type of activity. |
Forum: General Talk
01-25-2024, 07:59 AM
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That is what killed my grandmother in 1961. Prolonged immobility after the surgery. When they got her up and dressed to go home she died from a blood clot as she sat in a chair waiting for a wheelchair to come so they could take her out to the car.
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Forum: General Talk
01-21-2024, 11:30 AM
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My dad was either patient #1 or #2 for lens replacement surgery in 1980 or so. His first eye surgery took 6 1/2 hours. The second one a few month later only 2 1/2 hours. For some years later he had a note on his medical records that if he died the lenses in his eyes would have to be removed for evaluation.
About 20 years later I took my father in law in for lens replacement and didn't even get through two articles in the Smithsonian magazine in the lobby before we were on the way home.
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Forum: General Talk
01-21-2024, 11:11 AM
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Miranda's were never one of the "big" cameras. They were very popular among wedding photographers as backups and for candid photographs. They were very quiet compared to the normal SLR.
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Forum: General Talk
01-12-2024, 07:28 AM
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Youtube has to make money somehow. You can pay a relatively modest monthly fee and get ad free viewing. I'm old enough to remember the hook to switch to cable TV. No ads.
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Forum: Pentax KP
01-11-2024, 05:35 AM
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Very nice shots and I think that you just came up with the new Pentax slogan. It's okay! It's a Pentax!:lol:
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Forum: General Talk
01-09-2024, 07:42 AM
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Looks like a fox to me. The long "nose" is just an alignment of the nose with the front leg. Easily shows up if you blow up the image a bit.
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Forum: Pentax K-3 & K-3 II
01-06-2024, 10:52 AM
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The report on this incident is going to be pretty interesting. The plane is only a few months old. At least it did not happen at cruising altitude. Never heard of a plug door before. Some pilots and mechanics on another forum I belong to told about them when they saw the photo from inside the plane. Never thought that I could be seated next to a door and not even know it.
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Forum: Pentax K-3 & K-3 II
01-06-2024, 07:03 AM
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Anybody in the PNW find a 737 Max plug door in their back yard? Must have been one heck of a flight. Glad everyone is okay.
Paging RacerX!!!! NTSB on line 1.
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