Flavors of Christianity

On the national stage we have seen pundits saying that atheists shouldn’t be able to hold public office.Â What would their reaction be if I suggested that those who believed in gods shouldn’t be able to hold public office?

People get thrown out of their apartments, lose their jobs, get assaulted on the street, and occasionally are dragged to death behind pickup trucks for being gay.Â That doesn’t happen to people for being Christian.

Doctors get murdered for performing abortions.Â That doesn’t happen to people for being Christian.

Never mind lesser impositions, like being unable to marry, or even having ballot initiatives to invalidate marriages already performed.

But the people spreading this torrent of hate and violence claim they are Christians, and that it is Christian principles that cause them to perform their despicable actions, and that anybody who isn’t with them is going to hell; I guess as soon as they can get around to sending us.Â This is what “Christian” means today in US politics, and to a large extent in general discourse, because these are the Christians that we hear from.

And I’m finding myself less and less interested in spending effort to make fine distinctions among sects of a belief system that I’ve never believed. Anybody out there who doesn’t waht this to be the legacy of Christianity, get out there and change it yourself!

Convivial

Vultures are Circling the Convention

Music Party

First low-light event for the D700, so no flash at all, and I let the ISO go all the way to “H.02” (I believe that’s Nikonese for “Oh shit! Two stops underexposed!). Interestingly, I found that, though some of these are fairly noise (especially where the ISO is in 5 figures), they look a lot worse if I run Noise Ninja on them. I need to experiment more with that, maybe find better settings or something.

Hidden Falls Photos

I was there for a fall picnic (for which we had summer weather), and wandered around just a bit.

And, Finally, Tokina 28-70 ATX-Pro f/2.6-2.8

I got this to use with my Nikon N90 in 1994, when I first went into autofocus. It had a very high reputation then and since, but some of my professional contacts on mailing lists reported not-so-good performance from newer and supposedly better Tokina zooms.

I was considering sticking with this as my main lens for a while after I got the D700 (which brought me back into full-frame photography), but this required testing.

Results seemed pretty conclusive to me.

28mm f/2.8

Tokina ATX-Pro 28-70mm f/2.8 at 28mm, f/2.8

Those corners are really pretty appalling. This was a reshoot, because I was worried I’d somehow done it wrong in the initial shoot.

28mm f/4

Tokina ATX-Pro 28-70mm f/2.8 at 28mm, f/4

Some improvement; but more, some reason to believe that the f/2.8 result wasn’t a mistake somehow.

50mm f/2.8

Tokina ATX-Pro 28-70mm f/2.8 at 50mm, f/2.8

Considerable improvement in the corners; not so much in the center, I almost wonder if that was me? This is why sane people use tripods for lens testing, I believe. But that one was at 1/1000 sec., it really doesn’t seem likely it was camera shake.