Just to mark the point.
Archive for November, 2008
I seem to have come up as the “user of the day” at Seti@Home.
Which I guess means this is a good time to point out to people that the load on Team Minn-StF is being carried by very few people, the majority of whom have never lived in Minneapolis. I’m sure some more of you could manage to run BOINC and the Seti@Home client!
ETA: 
Screenshot, for people viewing this some other day.
A new blog article makes an interesting claim: “there some are words that Google thinks are never safe, regardless of what site is using them, what site links to them, or what the context is.”
Phrases that immediately spring to mind that would violate this Google taboo include “greedy bastards”, “naked greed”, and “This site contains no nude or erotic content”.
Richard Dyer-Bennet in 1947, by Allan Grant
My quick cleanup and curves adjustment. Since there’s no detail in the left side of his face or hands in the file available from Google, there wasn’t much to be done (I’m not up to that level of reconstruction).
The caption they have claims the instrument is something exotic, but it’s not; it’s a Spanish classical guitar.
Having checked out the results of the first test, I decided to run tests at a higher shutter speed, and with longer test series.
As before, these are 100% size crops out of the center, including the focus point. For this series, I had to go to ISO 800 to get the shutter speed I wanted.
VR off, 1/30:
Scarily, 1, 6, and 9 are sharp, hand-held free-standing at 1/30 sec. with a 200mm lens. That’s 3 out of 10, a 30% success rate. This is not supposed to happen.
What I see in the VR on group is a much higher percentage of not fully sharp images. Only two and three are fully sharp, about the same as without VR! But 5, 7, 9, and 10 are quite close to sharp.
This exactly matches my subjective impression—VR rarely produces a fully satisfactory image for me, but often helps to get a usable one. It’s certainly no substitute for a tripod!
Either that or the VR in my Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 isn’t working right.