your old bean 你老豆

Confusion.

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 05:22:00 +0000

Was reading a post on how the PM speaking about desecration of churches not being part of the "true Islam".

This got me thinking, what on earth is the "true" Islam, or Christianity, or Buddhism, or any other religion for that matter?
I am not a religious scholar, and I freely admit my ignorance, in the hopes that someone will step up and enlighten me. (heheh, religion; enlighten.)

There are certain parts of each religion that most people would consider abhorrent, such as the "true" Islam in the form of Syariah law where they chop off your hand for stealing, or stone you to death for adultery.

Christianity is no better, if you follow the "true" Christianity.

Matthew 6:5 - 7

5. And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites [are]: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
7 But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen [do]: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.

then stop praying in public.

All I'm saying is, in this day and age, we shouldn't try to base our lives around codes set down some millenia ago.

Feel free to shoot me down.

Peace. and to you Christians, STOP trying to shove your religion down my throat. It's annoying.

Things I find ridiculous: Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 04:42:00 +0000

My anatomy prof has started a rumor that i'm married with 2 wives. I can deal with that.

My classmates think it's true. That, I cannot deal with. Vie de merde....

Things I find ridiculous: Pt 1

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 05:07:00 +0000

Girls half my weight complaining how fat they are.
Exchanging gifts at Christmas, because God know how much I need another snowman doll.

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:42:00 +0000

You're Doing It Wrong: How to Properly Buy, Maintain and Use a Knife [Cutlery]

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 23:33:00 +0000

You're Doing It Wrong: How to Properly Buy, Maintain and Use a Knife [Cutlery]: "

The knife is the most essential kitchen gadget of all, yet people still buy those 25-in-one Ikea knife blocks. I called up Norman Weinstein, knife guru at New York's Institute of Culinary Education, to get some straight talk on knives.

On Choosing a Knife

Those all-in-one knife sets you can get at a department store are for suckers. 'You really shouldn't buy a set with 42 knives,' says Weinstein, 'since you'll probably only need five or six.' Here are the useful knives, in descending order of importance:

Chef's Knife: This is your all-purpose knife, so don't skimp on it—get a forged knife, which is molded through a process of pounding heated metal into shape and treating it, rather than stamped out of a sheet. Chef Weinstein suggests (mandates, really) a minimum of 8 inches, and preferably 10. Just because you have small hands or uncertain kitchen skills doesn't mean you should get a smaller knife, since all it'll do is decrease your leverage and "make the whole job much more difficult."

Buying a chef's knife can be difficult, but the key tip is to remember that this knife is all about weight and balance. 'It shouldn't be blade heavy or handle heavy,' says Weinstein.

Paring Knife: The paring knife is about 2 to 4 inches long and used for extremely delicate work (think small fruits like grapes and berries) as well as smaller items like shallots.

Bread Knife: Perhaps the last of the absolute essentials, this long, straight blade should be the only serrated knife in your collection. Use it for slicing bread and delicate or gooey produce like tomatoes.

Utility Knife: This knife has a smaller and thinner blade than the chef's knife, around 6 inches. Chef Weinstein notes that it's 'the perfect fruit knife' but concedes that if you're on a budget, a paring knife can do the work of a utility knife.

Carving Knife: A long, thin blade, the carving knife is used to, well, carve thin slices of meat. It's extremely well-suited to this task, if this is a task you find yourself regularly performing.

Boning Knife: Like the carving knife, you may have no need for the boning knife, but if you are prone to buying whole chickens and other plucked or butchered fare, you'll find it invaluable. Boning knives have a thin and flexible blade and are used pretty much exclusively for boning.

Knife Upkeep

So you've bought a sweet new 10-inch forged chef's knife. How do you keep it in tip-top condition? There's nothing more dangerous than a dull knife, after all—not only do dull knives tend to slip more easily, but they require more force to cut through things. More force equals more danger. Chef Weinstein's tips:

Use a honing steel: A honing steel, which is that long cylindrical piece of metal all too often mistaken for a sharpener, is actually used to realign your knife's blade. Use it 'practically every time you use your straight-edge knife,' says Weinstein. 'It should only take about 15 seconds, done properly.' The key is to anchor the steel perpendicular to your countertop, and slice both sides of the knife across it at a 22-degree angle.

Avoid the dishwasher: Knives and cutting boards alike should be cleaned in the same way. Immediately after use, clean with soap, hot water and a non-abrasive scrubber (sponges are fine here). Never stick a good knife in the dishwasher: The force of the water can dull the blade, and it's never a good idea to have an extremely sharp pointy object rattling around a dishwasher. Knife handles could potentially warp, too, because of the heat.

Take your knives to a professional sharpener: Don't use a home sharpening machine unless you feel your knife has wronged you in some way and must be punished. Send your knives away to a professional sharpener about once a year to have your blade re-shaped.

On Cutting Boards

There's a lot of misunderstanding about cutting boards. Chef Weinstein says only one material will do: Wood. Not plastic ('It'll dull your knife'), not bamboo ('It's harder than wood and lousy for your knife'), and certainly nothing like stone ('Are you crazy?!').

Go for a nice hard maple board—it's just about the best investment you can make after a good chef's knife. "A good maple cutting board will go into your will," says Weinstein. Plus, if you're doing some hard cutting and you end up gouging the wood, a maple cutting board can simply be sanded down and re-seasoned with mineral oil and be good as new.

Just don't ever stick it in your dishwasher—wash it with warm soapy water immediately after use, and oil it up with mineral oil whenever it starts looking too dry.

How to Hold a Knife

Chef Weinstein's instruction for actually using a knife is all about relaxation. Keep your arms in a relaxed position and choke up on the knife: Your thumb and forefinger should be pinching the actual blade, not wrapped around the handle. It'll take some adjustment to hold the knife this way, but Weinstein reminds us, 'You have to use the knife correctly before you can cut anything.'

The actual motion of the blade is much more a sliding, fluid movement than a choppy-chop staccato rhythm. 'It's all about relaxing and following through, just like golf or tennis,' says Weinstein.

These tips are a good primer, but once you've got the basics down, you've still got to practice. Over and over again. Mince about a few hundred cloves of garlic, chop a couple dozen stalks of celery, and dice an army's worth of onions—more than anything else, repeated use of proper knife skills will save you time, keep your fingers safe, and improve your cooking. Thanks Chef!

For more than 20 years, Norman Weinstein, a chef-instructor at New York's Institute of Culinary Education, has taught everyone from enthusiastic amateur cooks (including our own Wilson Rothman) to professional chefs how to select and use knives. He is also the author of Mastering Knife Skills. He has been profiled in Wine Spectator and the New York Times Magazine, and has appeared on the Food Network. The 2003 honoree of the New York Association of Culinary Professionals, Weinstein lives in New York City.

Note: The images of knives above do not represent any particular brand endorsements by Chef Weinstein or Gizmodo. They are merely used to indicate general shapes of the discussed knives. Top image from Wikimedia Commons.

Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.

Photography Kick-start Guide: How Your Camera Works

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 08:48:00 +0000

Photography Kick-start Guide: How Your Camera Works: "

Most photography tutorials, including most of the ones you’ll find here on the Tuts+ network of web sites, assume a certain base level of knowledge. But what if you’ve only just decided you want to make the leap into taking photos with manual settings?

In this tutorial you’ll start to begin to learn the fundamentals of photography – fundamentals that will allow you to start reading and using more advanced tutorials, and manipulating the manual settings on your camera. Here we cover exposure, how the camera works, the shutter, focus, light, depth of field and ISO.

As in any specialized field, photography has a lot of jargon. This tutorial will introduce specialized camera terminology where appropriate, but I made a conscious effort to avoid using it through most of the tutorial if a more accessible word would convey the same meaning. What we want for you to learn here are the photographic concepts and having to juggle newly introduced words that aren’t yet familiar to you gets in the way of that.

Lastly, these concepts apply to photography in the broadest sense. No matter what kind of camera you use, the most basic fundamentals of photography will apply equally.

Making the Exposure

What is “exposure”? This word may be one of the more confusing ones you’ll come across. It’s used in many different contexts and has a slightly different meaning in each. Sticking with the broadest sense, exposure, in a nutshell, is the picture you are taking (or the one you took.)

When you press the button on your camera, you are literally “exposing” it to light. All photography is captured light. Without light, there is no picture. Again, boiling it down to its most fundamental level, we don’t see things we see the light reflected off things.

The light reflected into your eyes is how you see — and how your camera sees.

Think about this for a moment. Let’s take something simple like a rock. If you hold it in your hand, go outside and look at it in bright daylight and you see a rock. Take it indoors under artificial light and you still see a rock. Take it into a blackened room in which there is no light at all. You can feel the rock, so you know it’s still there, but you can’t see it because there is no light. All along, what you were seeing wasn’t the rock itself but the light reflected off the rock.

When we take a picture, what we’re really doing is recording the light reflected off whatever it is our camera is pointed at. That is the exposure.

Recording What the Camera Sees

The next step on our journey of understanding how cameras work is learning how, exactly, a camera records what it is exposed to. Most popular today are certainly digital cameras. These have a highly specialized computer chip inside them that is extremely sensitive to light. In the interest of keeping this tutorial easy to follow, I’m going to call it “the film”.

The computer chip is the ‘film’ that your digital camera uses to take pictures. Film is familiar to most people because, before digital, film is what we used to record our exposures. In this case, the film was literally a thin ‘film’ of plastic that had been coated with light-sensitive chemicals. Before film, photographers used glass plates which they often had to coat with chemicals themselves. Kodak, Fuji and Agfa weren’t in business yet!

A camera, at its most basic, is nothing more than a light-proof box. It has an opening that is covered up by a light-proof curtain called the shutter. Directly in front of the shutter is where we put the lens. We’ll discuss both the shutter and the lens in more detail further on.

When you press the button on your camera to take a picture, what happens is that the shutter opens and exposes “the film” to light. For just a very brief moment. Less than the blink of an eye. The film is so sensitive to light that that very brief exposure is all that it needs in order to see and record whatever was in front of the camera when the shutter was opened.

Back in the old days of film, you then had to advance the film. This was usually accomplished either by a lever on top of the camera, a wheel on back or a motorized drive mechanism built into the camera. It was sliding the film along a track to expose a fresh portion.

If you’ve never pulled the film all the way out of a film canister, just know that it’s about 1/2” (24cm) high by around 3’ (1m) long. Each time you press the button and open the shutter, only a very tiny segment of the film (about 3/4” or 36cm) is actually exposed to light. The rest has been carefully shielded. In the really really old days of glass plates, the photographer had to actually remove the plate from the camera and store it in a light-proof container until he/she could develop it. If you wanted another picture, you had to insert a new glass plate.

In the digital age, the chip inside your camera saves the image it recorded to the camera’s internal memory buffer. After the chip saves its information to the camera’s internal memory buffer, it clears itself and gets ready to take another picture. The camera’s internal memory buffer can usually hold all the information for five to ten pictures. In the meantime, yet another process takes all the information from the camera’s internal memory buffer and writes it to the card. (Most digital cameras use some type of removable memory card. CF and SD cards are most popular today but there have been around a dozen different types over the years.)

This writing of data to the card is a comparatively slower process. That’s why your camera uses an internal memory buffer, so it can be ready for the next picture more quickly rather than making you wait for it to write everything out to the card.

How the Shutter Works

While understanding exactly how shutters work is not necessary for taking good pictures, an explanation follows because it may help with understanding other fundamental concepts in photography.

The shutter.

First, let’s define a couple of terms.

Frame: This is another word that has a couple of different meanings. For instance, one exposure (one picture) may also be called one frame.

For the purposes of our discussion about how shutters work, the frame is the opening in the camera body that the shutter covers. When the shutter is open, light passes through the frame to expose the image.

Curtain: What we tend to generically call “the shutter” is actually a collection of parts. Most importantly, there are really two different light-proof curtains that make up the whole shutter assembly. For our purposes here, we need to be able to refer to each of the shutter curtains individually.

The first one (”Curtain A“) is attached to the top of the frame. It expands downward to cover the frame and contracts upward to expose it. The second (”Curtain B“) is attached to the bottom of the frame. It expands upward to cover the frame and contracts downward to expose it.

Let’s assume that currently Curtain A is expanded downward, covering the frame. Curtain B is then contracted, letting Curtain A do the work of blocking light from getting through.

When you press the button on your camera to take a picture, the following sequence of events takes place:

Curtain A contracts upward, exposing the frame.

Curtain B expands upward, covering the frame and ending the exposure.

The interval between these two events is the shutter speed. The next time you press the shutter button, Curtain B contracts downward followed by Curtain A expanding downward. They will keep alternating in this way for the life of the camera. On old film cameras without motor drives the curtains did not alternate. Rather the winder ‘cocked’ the shutter, resetting it for the next exposure but all other principles explained here still hold true.

At slow shutter speeds (i.e.- 1/15^th second), the movements of the two curtains may be separate events. During almost the full duration of the exposure, the frame is left completely uncovered. At fast shutter speeds (i.e.- 1/2,000^th second), both curtains may be moving simultaneously with only a slit between them moving up (or down) across the frame.

Suppose there was only one curtain. (Let’s use Curtain A.) The curtain would contract upward then, after the duration set by your shutter speed, expand downward to end the exposure.

The top section of the frame would be the last exposed to light and the first shielded. For a relatively long exposure (i.e.- 1/4^th second), the difference in exposure time between the top and bottom of the frame as a percentage of the total exposure time, would be insignificant and you’d hardly notice a difference. At faster shutter speeds (i.e.- 1/1,000^th second), the difference as a percentage of total exposure time would be much more significant. You’d end up with an image that gradually darkened from bottom to top.

Having two curtains also allows for much faster shutter speeds. Think of the mechanics involved in an object moving very rapidly in one direction, stopping, then reversing course and moving very rapidly in the opposite direction, all while allowing you to maintain precise control over its speed of movement. Even if it could be done, the mechanical strain would result in faster wearing and greater breakage of parts.

Bringing It Into Focus

At its absolute most basic, we’ve already covered everything that’s technically needed for photography: a light sensitive medium (the film or digital camera chip), a light-proof box (the camera body), an opening to allow light to get to the film (the frame) and a way to control the light getting to the film (the shutter). If you were to make a pinhole camera, these are all the parts you’d need. Everything else simply makes photography “better”; faster, more convenient, and more flexible.

The next part we’ll add to this very basic setup is the lens. Your camera may have a built-in lens permanently attached or it may allow you to change lenses.

What the lens does is take all the light in front of the camera and focus it.

A projector has a flat point of focus.

Think of an old fashioned slide projector or an old film projector. If you took one of those slides or a section of that filmstrip and held it up between a lamp and the wall, the light from the lamp would not project any kind of meaningful image onto the wall. At best you would see vague patches of colorful light. With the projector, you use a lens to focus and concentrate that light onto a more defined area rather than just letting it spread in all directions.

The lens on the front of your camera does exactly the same thing, only in the opposite direction. Instead of focusing the light that would otherwise spread randomly outward, it takes the light that already is spread randomly around and focuses it onto “the film”. (By the way, your eye is a lens too. It has exactly the same kind of structure and the same basic features as any camera lens.)

Let’s look at how a lens is made and then we’ll talk about the mechanics of focusing. (We’re going to skip over aperture for now and deal with that in its own section.)

Lenses focus light on to the film.

Even the very simplest of lenses consists of at least two “elements”. An element is a single piece of glass. (I say glass but it could also be made from plastic or even from other exotic materials.) Every element has at least one curved surface. Look closely at a pair of eyeglasses. You’ll notice that they’re not just flat plates of window glass. Usually the front surface of each lens is curved outward, away from the wearer, and the rear surface is curved inward, toward the center of the lens and also away from the wearer.

On a camera lens, elements may have one flat surface and one curved surface, they may have two surfaces curved in the same direction (just like eyeglasses) or they may have two surfaces curved in opposite directions, either both outward or both inward.

If there were just a single piece of glass, it would modify the light but there would still be no way to focus it. Going back to our example of holding a slide or section of filmstrip between a lamp and the wall, if you insert a magnifying glass or eyeglass lens into the equation, you will notice a change to the light reflected on the wall but you still couldn’t make the reflection into a sharp image.

Adding a second piece of glass, also curved on at least one surface, gives you the ability to focus. Focusing is accomplished by moving

the two pieces of glass closer together or farther apart. (They can also be moved, as a set, closer to or farther from the film.)

When light passes through each of these glass elements, the curved surface(s) “bend” the rays of light. Most lenses have many more than two glass elements and, together, they may bend the light multiple times in complicated ways. Sometimes two or more elements may be glued together. These are called groups. (Just to keep things confusing, a single element all by itself is also called a group.) So if you look at technical specifications for a lens you may see something like “13 elements in 7 groups”. Now you have an idea what that means.

In the end, the goal of all this is to bend and concentrate the light rays so that they form a sharp, clear image on the film.

Lens elements.

Fine-tuning the Light

With a lens on the front of the camera, you can choose between having an image that’s in focus or one that’s out of focus but there really is no in between. In order to fine-tune the effects you can get and increase your creative possibilities, we need to add more.

Aperture.

The aperture is a set of light-proof blades arranged in a circle inside the lens. At the center of the circle is an opening much like the hole in the center of a doughnut. (True to form, the word “aperture” refers to two different things. The entire assembly itself is called the aperture, or sometimes the diaphragm, but the hole is also called the aperture. When most people say aperture they are referring to the hole and not the assembly of parts which form the hole.) The size of the aperture’s opening can be adjusted in very precise increments to control how much light is allowed to pass through the lens and get to the film.

Even if your camera doesn’t provide you a way to control it directly, all but the simplest cameras employ apertures.

The size of the aperture opening is never measured in direct units. For example, you’d never hear someone say “my aperture is 10mm”. Instead, it’s expressed in relation to the focal length, or zoom length, of the lens. It also follows a logarithmic scale, making the whole concept even harder for non-rocket scientists to follow. So, for example, if your aperture opening were 10mm in diameter and you were using a 100mm lens, you would actually say your aperture was f10. This means that the diameter of the aperture opening was 1/10^th that of your focal length. That same 10mm opening on a 50mm lens would be f5 because the diameter is only 1/5^th that of the focal length. (The “f” in that expression is short-hand for “focal length”.) Confusing? Definitely. But there’s a reason for it. We’re getting there!

Typical aperture settings are: f1.4, f2, f2.8, f4, f5.6, f8, f11, f16, f22. Each of these is a whole stop — exposure increments in photography are referred to as “stops” — and each represents half as much light getting through the lens as the stop before it and twice as much as the stop after. Some lenses may open wider than f1.4 or close down smaller than f22, but they are not common.

Also, your lens may not even have the full range listed above. On the front of the lens you should find a marking such as “17mm f5.6” or possibly “17mm 1:5.6”. The f5.6 in our example represents the widest aperture that is available on that lens. So, in this example, you could use any of the settings from f5.6 to f22. The actual numbers on your lens may vary and if you’re using a zoom lens you’ll have two sets of numbers. The first refers to the shortest end of the zoom range and the second refers to the longest end of the range.

So just why are apertures measured the way they are? To understand that, you have to know what an aperture actually does.

The primary function of the aperture is to regulate the amount of light that’s allowed to pass through the lens and get to the film. Because the blades making up the aperture mechanism are light-proof, light coming through the lens can only get through the hole created by the mechanism. One of the things that all that bending of the light rays does is to squeeze the light through the hole. That way, when you close down the aperture, you do not see a bright center spot and darker edges.

A side effect, and the most important thing as far as photographers are concerned, is that changing the size of the aperture changes how much of your scene is in focus.

This is going to take a bit of explaining, so let’s give it its own section.

Depth of Field

Going back to our example of a slide projector or a film projector, the slide (or film) is flat and the screen onto which the image is being projected is flat. Projector lenses don’t have apertures because the amount of light they put out is a known and constant quantity and the two flat surfaces means they can focus from Point A (the slide/film surface) to Point B (the screen).

Depth of field.

The real world is three dimensional. Your lens may be focusing all the light it sees onto a flat surface, but that light is all coming from non-flat surfaces. Technically speaking, a lens can only achieve perfect focus on a single plane at a time. As things get farther away from that plane, whether closer to or farther from the camera, they get progressively more out of focus. Up to a certain point, the degree of blurriness caused by being out of focus is so miniscule that it can’t even be detected by the naked eye. What you end up with is a range in which everything appears to be in focus even though technically only one point is actually in perfect focus. This range is known as “depth of field”.

In the interest of trying to cover all the jargon you are likely to come across in your photographic studies, there is another term called “circle of confusion”. Think of a pencil point. When the pencil is freshly sharpened it has a very fine point. Let’s say that any given point that is in the plane of perfect focus could be represented by the sharpness of this pencil point. As you use the pencil, it very gradually dulls. The point becomes rounder, larger and wider. The change is not sudden, so many of these intermediate degrees of sharpness might appear to be just as sharp as when the pencil point was perfect. We would say that those fall within the depth of field. At some point the pencil tip becomes larger and more dull. You can plainly see that it’s not as sharp as when the point was perfect. At that point, the circle of confusion has been breached and your brain no longer confuses the ever-so-slightly dull pencil point with the perfectly sharp one. You know that the pencil point is dull; or in this metaphor, you recognize that parts of your image are not in focus.

How all this pertains to aperture is that as you close down the aperture to ever-smaller openings, the depth of field becomes larger. That is, a much greater range within your scene appears to be in sharp focus. This can be useful, for example, if you are trying to photograph a large field of flowers that extends from only a few arm lengths away out to the horizon and want it all to be in focus.

This portrait-style picture leaves the background out of focus.

Understanding this phenomenon will help you to know that the opposite must also be true; as you open your aperture to ever-wider openings, the depth of field becomes smaller. This is often used in portraiture, where photographers often like to have the person they are photographing in focus but would like the background pleasingly blurred and out of focus.

I promised to explain why aperture values follow such a hard-to-understand logarithmic scale rather than just permitting direct measurement of the opening. Now that we’ve gone over a bit about aperture and how it works plus covered a few things about lenses and focusing, let’s briefly put it together. The reason is that the same diameter opening will make your pictures look different when you use lenses of different lengths. A diaphragm opening of 10mm would be extraordinarily wide on a 12mm lens, only modest on an 80mm lens and very small on a 300mm lens. The effect, both in terms of how much light could get through as well as depth of field, would not be the same from one lens to the next.

That would be like saying that a meter means one unit of measurement in Singapore, a completely different unit of measurement in Norway and another unit still in Australia. Without standardization, a unit of measure starts to become meaningless. So instead, the measure is expressed as a percentage of the focal length of the lens. This provides the needed amount of standardization so that the effect on your pictures (at least as far as aperture is concerned) is the same no matter what lens you are using.

The increments on the scale may seem somewhat random, but they are actually calculated in keeping with the halving and doubling that is common with all other photographic measures. In this case, halving or doubling the area of the opening and thus the quantity of light allowed to pass through.

Controlling Brightness Through Exposure Time

Photographers may get so caught-up in the secondary effect of aperture — depth of field — that they forget the primary purpose it was designed to serve; to regulate the amount of light allowed to pass through the lens.

We’ve already discussed that all of photography is the capturing and recording of light. It’s worth mentioning that all of the light a camera records is cumulative. Most often, your camera’s film or digital sensor only needs to be exposed to light for tiny fractions of a second in order to capture and record an image. When the light gets low, you may need to leave the shutter open longer in order to let more light in.

Playing with exposure at night-time.

As long as the shutter is open, your camera is gathering light. If it happens that your image contains a moving subject and the subject’s speed of movement is faster than the shutter speed you’re using, it will register as a blur in your image. Knowing this can be very useful.

Sometimes, you may purposely want your subject to be blurred, or completely frozen. Knowing about the relationship between shutter speed and speed of subject movement will help you pick better settings. You don’t need 1/4,000^th of a second to freeze someone moving at a walking pace when 1/125^th of a second may do the job.

Conventional wisdom has it that faster moving subjects always demand faster shutter speeds. It can be useful to study the effect that different

shutter speeds have on an image. Do you want to freeze the action? Convey a hint of motion? Or let the motion produce an effect?

Controlling the shutter speed may be useful or necessary to freeze (or deliberately blur) a moving subject. For example, with moving water, a fast shutter speed will freeze individual droplets. A very long (slow) shutter speed will produce a flowing, cotton candy effect. There is a whole range of speeds available between these extremes.

Sensitivity to Light

So far we’ve talked about two different ways in which cameras manage the light that is used to make an exposure: aperture and shutter speed. There are two more ways in which cameras control light. One of the two ways is by adding more light. This is usually done through the use of flash. Flash is such a big subject, we’re going to reserve it for its own tutorial. For now, just know that it’s one of the tools available to you.

The other method is commonly called ISO. ISO is actually an acronym for the International Standards Organization. This is the group that helps to set standards for everything; from electrical output and tire sizes to the hardness of steel and the softness of cotton. They also set the standards for sensitivity to light.

From a photographic perspective, ISO is really a reference to “film speed”. Let’s step back and think of a film again for a moment. You can walk into any shop that still sells film and you’ll find a number of different varieties. You may see so-called “100 speed” film, “200 speed” film, “400 speed” film and so on. Alternatively, these may be marketed as ISO100, ISO200, ISO400 and so on. (Notice that we’re back on this halving and doubling of values that is standard throughout all photographic measurements.)

Consumer films typically range from ISO50-ISO800. Digital cameras typically range from ISO100-ISO400, though some can go as low as ISO50 and it’s becoming more common for them to go as high as ISO6400. At the extremes, specialty films can range from single digit ISO numbers to numbers of ISO30,000+.

The scale is the same for both film and digital. Here is a quick rundown of some ISO values you may see:

ISO25 is very insensitive, requiring very bright light.

ISO50 is twice as sensitive but still requires very bright light.

ISO100 is the mainstream default for both film and digital. It is used mainly in bright daylight or a comparable level of brightness.

ISO200 is the next whole increment in sensitivity. It is billed as an “all-around” film. Outdoors, this might be used around dusk and dawn.

ISO400 is the next whole stop. It can capture images in relatively low light, particularly indoors or during twilight hours.

ISO800 is for nighttime photos with limited light.

ISO1600 is for use in dark environments.

ISO3200 and beyond are for use in very dark environments.

As a rule, more sensitive media (higher ISO numbers) will yield images with more grain. In some cases, the graininess can become extreme, even affecting image quality. While often unwanted, this is sometimes used to enhance a certain “feel”.

There is also an inverse relationship between color saturation and ISO sensitivity. ISO100 will have little to no grain, will be very sharp and have vivid colors. ISO400 will generally have moderate but perhaps noticeable grain and muted colors. ISO1600 will usually have ‘extreme’ amounts of grain and very muted — almost monochromatic — colors.

Wrapping it all up

Here we’ve covered the basic parts of a camera and the ways that cameras can exercise a great deal of control over the light that makes up your photos. Together, these methods can be used in limitless combinations to achieve almost any effect you can think of. Each of these has side-effects that may or may not be desirable for the photo you want to take. Controlling how much light gets in by changing the aperture will increase or decrease your depth of field. Controlling how long the light is allowed in by adjusting the shutter speed will increase or decrease motion blur. Controlling how much light is needed by changing ISO may affect graininess and color saturation.

No one expects that simply reading through an article like this one time will suddenly make you an expert on this stuff. You may need to read over it a few times. You may want to come back to it from time to time to refresh your memory on a concept. The goal here has been to help you build a foundation whereby you can study our other tutorials and be able to follow along when some of these unfamiliar concepts come up.

Good luck and happy shooting!

The Creation of Time and Space [Science]

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 02:08:00 +0000

The Creation of Time and Space [Science]: "

Maybe I like this because it looks like a Leopard desktop—I hope Leopard came with the animations—but if you have to watch a science video today, let astrophysicist Janne Levin explain you what the Big Bang was.

Still there? Well, then maybe you want another science video. One mindblowing one.

Yes, I know. I need a vacation too. [DRB]

Assess Your Needs Ahead of Time to Keep Dorm Room Clutter Under Control [College]

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 15:27:00 +0000

Assess Your Needs Ahead of Time to Keep Dorm Room Clutter Under Control [College]: "

Thousands of students are preparing to go to college next month and most of them are hauling an astounding amount of stuff with them. If you're one of them, you can cut down by realistically assessing your needs.

Trent, at the frugality blog The Simple Dollar, found a bunch of pictures of his college dorm. Reflecting on that time he realized he had a lot of crap. Stuff that he didn't need, but at some point had thought he would need, might possibly need, could possibly need, and so he hauled it into his tiny dorm.

What I saw was a lot of clutter. A fridge I rarely used. A robe I think I used once. A big rack of rarely-watched videos. Way more clothes than I ever needed. Lots of little tchotchkes that just took up space.

When I was first planning for college, I had little idea what I was doing. I read lots of 'here's how to get ready for college' articles and vacuumed up the suggestions like a Hoover on overdrive. I spent the entire summer collecting and buying things I'd need for college.

I could, with small variation, have written the same thing—the photo above is my freshman dorm room the night I unpacked all my stuff.

He goes on to say if he were to start all over he'd arrive at college with nothing but a generously-sized backpack, I myself have often said if I knew then what I know now, I'd have taken nothing more than a basic military foot locker. It's easy to over-pack for college. You're venturing into an unknown territory, leaving behind the comfort of home, and bringing lots of stuff with you is a way bring part of your previous life with you. Most of the time 90 percent of it goes unused and you just waste space and spend time cleaning around it.

How can you avoid ending up in a 12x10 foot room with 15x15 feet worth of stuff? Ask yourself some simple questions when packing:

Is there a smaller version of this? Do you need a full-sized computer tower or would a laptop do?
Is this thing replicating a service available on campus? Why bring shelves of books if you have a large campus library?
What function does this thing serve? Do I actually need that function? Can I make do with less?
Does the importance of immediate access to this thing out weigh the inconvenience of going out to find it? Do you really need a photo printer if there is a Walgeen's with a photo kiosk a quarter mile from your dorm?
If you haven't purchased the thing yet: Is this thing so unique and so immediately useful that I don't want to risk being unable to purchase it once I've moved in?
Am I bringing this because I need it or because I think it says something about me and I want people to see that?

The last question might seem a little overly philosophical, but it's an important consideration. I lived across the hallway from a guy who had a longboard surfboard in his room despite our dorm being not only in land-locked city but over a thousand miles from any good surfing beaches. It was perpetually in the way and his room mates hated it, but it was a giant fiberglass monument to his identity as a surfer and he wouldn't budge on removing it.

Whether you're packing for college as we speak or reflecting on a Freshman year long gone, what absolute necessities would you take with you and what could be—or should have been—left behind?

Dorm Room Clutter: What Do You Actually Need for College [via TheSimpleDollar]

Thief Steals Laptop, Taunts Victim Using Her Facebook Account [Crime]

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:56:00 +0000

this is just disgusting.

Thief Steals Laptop, Taunts Victim Using Her Facebook Account [Crime]: "

Not content with stealing a UK woman's laptop, iPhone, Nintendo DS and handbag—a shithead burglar has logged into her Facebook account, leaving messages like "on my new laptop", "listening to music on my new phone feels so good."

The illiterate low-life went on to mock:

'I have the laptop, phones ok but a bit scratched itll do, tv was rubbish so I left it , ds was a bonus, now to the porn shop, thankyou toshiba is my favourite make'.

The sick scenario is a cautionary true tale to think twice about what data you store on your laptop, and a reminder that you should use some basic security to protect it. [Telegraph via TechRadar]

What Is This? [Image Cache]

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 02:15:00 +0000

What Is This? [Image Cache]: "

Is it an alien desert crop circle made from cars and campers? Some kind of ancient civilization uncovered by freak dust storm? Truth be told it's neither, actually:

It's Burning Man 2005!

Giz reader Dean sent in a slew of aerial photos from the event four years ago after reading our post on the retro rocket being erected in Nevada this year.

These pics are cool because, as many of you know, we dig airplanes here at Gizmodo. And Burning Man, it just so happens, has had its own fully functional airport since 1999.

That's a good thing, believe you me, because it gives us some nice bird's eye shots of this immense event:

Korea Day 7 Bukhansan national park

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 16:41:00 +0000

really pissed that blogger still hasn't upgraded it's photo handling capabilities.
it really detracts from it as a platform for blogging, even with it's tight integration with picasa.
as a whole, this is one of the main reasons i've stayed away for so long.

so i'm in korea now, in case anyone cares or doesn't know.
and i went to bukhansan national park today with a couple of lecturers from the ISC program and a former student assistant.
this is definitely one of the "must go" places but i wouldn't recommend it unless you have a good guide.

it's really hilly, and it's more of a mountain range than a park.
the scenery is really beautiful, but most of the time i was too busy wondering if i would survive the climb to really take it in.

first i didn't pack a pair of shoes that were suitable for hiking, instead only wearing sneakers.
secondly, i'm not in terrific physical shape.
thirdly, it' s been drizzling non-stop, making the ground really wet and slippery, especially the rocks which are so smooth that they offer almost no footholds at all.

combine these factors and i'm lucky to have survived at all

but why am i complaining?
i had fun right?

true.
i took loads of pictures, got some much needed exercise, had really good gimbap (a korean version of sushi, rice and condiments rolled in seaweed, which i think is superior because it keeps really well) and i am still alive.
nothing like a NDE (near death experience) to remind you how precious life is.

Moving Out of RC

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Sat, 30 May 2009 14:38:00 +0000

my work/study area, a mishmash of odds and ends, a melange, a gallimaufry..... I'll miss it.

my dumbell, and the phone that doesn't work anymore (right under the curtain)

my shoes, which i leave anywhere that my feet happen to leave them

The time has finally come to move out.

I've gotten so attached to this room. It's my confidant, my friend, my fortress of solitude, my batcave.

Now as I'm stuffing my bags full of stuff I didn't know I still had (oh, so that's where my other sock was! etc.)

I don't know how you can describe the feeling of packing, it's like systematically deconstructing your identity, without realising it, my room has become an extension of personality, a part of how i define myself.

Restoring my room to its pristine state is like tearing down part of my life. I just can't continue writing.

This post is dedicated to the memory of my room, may you never have to be neat again.

A snapshot of Hall Life

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:44:00 +0000

Living in a hall can be fun, or it can suck.
usually it lies in between the thwo extremes, but tends to swing to the sucky side a bit too much for my liking.

One of the things you can't control is the people you live with.

Just at dinner today, the guy living in the room next to me runs out and asks me to help him remove a bug in his room.

picture this, a guy in his early 20s, needing help to remove a bug, an insect not even a quarter of a tenth of a hundreth his size.

turned out the bug wasn't even poisonous, just a leafhopper that got in by mistake (to a room on the 5th floor! no less, must have been a really high jump for a leafhopper)

oh, did i mention he was studying environmental science?
and that he mentioned that he did a vivisection of a grasshopper just the day before?

forget women, i'll never even understand men......

seriously.

it's been a long time, far too long

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:20:00 +0000

wow, 3 months just flew by.

i haven't been committed to updating this blog, hence the dearth of posts.
it's not that i have nothing to blog about, rather i have too much to feel, too much to think about, but not enough resolution to put finger to keyboard to document my thoughts.
what a loss for posterity huh?

speaking of resolution, youtube now supports HD uploads of videos, and it just so happens i joined a TV club that makes movies.
we don't have the equipment to shoot in HD yet (come on, student outfit what)
but animation is another story altogether.

this is an animation i spent about 20 hours on, it's our opening credits, kinda like the ones you see whenever you see a film by 20th century fox or dreamworks.
yet for all the time i put in (20 hours, i'll be mentioning this figure for some time to come)
the final product is only 30 seconds long.

20 hours=30 seconds.
how does that even equate?

so anyway, bringing up that point about youtube being able to display HD videos now, i uploaded it to youtube for your viewing pleasure!
in HD!
remember to watch in HD, doesn't look good in low resolution.

please tell me what you think in the comments.

btw
this is a good indication of what i'm doing with my time for those of you interested in such things.

Learning Photoshop: Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:12:00 +0000

I recently got a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS4.

It would be a good idea not to ask where or how i got it.

Anyway, just having a copy of Photoshop isn't good enough.

You have to learn to navigate the maze that is photoshop's user interface.

I suppose for long time users, the interface comes as second nature, but to the beginner it is really really really intimidating.

Anyway, the best way to learn something new is to just jump in headlong and learn stuff as you go along, right?

That's a first effort, so yeah, it kinda fails in certain departments, creativity for one.

It's a poster I had to prepare for RCTV, an audio visual club in my hall, which I may go into more detail at a later date.

Right

Onto the tutorial!

Internet Explorer security breach

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:22:00 +0000

For those of you who choose to stubbornly trudge on with the bloated, antiquated, sluggish beast that is Internet Explorer for your forays in cyberspace, let me first say that i pity you.

Truly, I do pity you.

However, for those of you stuck with it, for whatever reason, here's some news that you might want to hear.

There has been news of a security breach of Microsoft's vaunted IE, which could, I quote

"Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer are being urged by experts to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed.

The flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer could allow criminals to take control of people's computers and steal their passwords, internet experts say."

You can tell I quoted it because it's in between those two squiggly lines.

Full article can be found here.

Fortunately (for you), there is a solution.

To prevent any further loss in market share, Microsoft had to be quick to release a security patch, which I recommend you download, post haste, lest you are a masochist, and enjoy living with the knowledge that sooner or later, someone will steal something from you.

Again I quote

"Security experts advised users to stay off Internet Explorer due to a serious security exploit in all versions of IE, and a third-party developer even pushed out an unofficial temporary fix, but you can now go grab the official patch straight from the source. The patches are available in several different downloads depending on what version of IE you're using and what OS you're running, and not all of the downloads are pointing to existing pages yet, but they should hopefully all be rolled out sometime today.

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-078 - Critical [Microsoft]"

via Lifehacker.com

Or, you could save yourself some hair-pulling, and switch to any number of popular free alternatives to IE, such as Firefox 3, Google Chrome, or even Opera 9 (soon to be 10).

It's really simple really, not only is IE inherently unstable, with many holes for hackers to slip through, there are also a lot, and I mean a lot, like literally 70% or more of all computers surfing the Internet use IE. It's just economics, by cracking IE once, hackers gain access to the secrets of a greater percentage of the web browsing community.

It's the same analogy why Mac users don't "have" virus problems, it's simply not worth it to write a virus that targets such a small subset of the community.

What are you waiting for. Go update now!

And also contemplate the switch to a free OS, such as Ubuntu, which means you pay less money on the OS, and more money to souping up your hardware.

That's all for now.

some snapshots of hong kong

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 07:52:00 +0000

what my room looks like on laundry day.

costs $4 per load >0<

just me looking like a complete fool for the camera

i'm much more yeng in real life

yeah

see what i mean

where i spend most of my time

too lazy to write more, and i'm getting sick of how idiotically difficult it is to upload images with blogger. may consider moving the whole thing to another platform.

oh the 'well built' guy below is the vice chancellor. yay

exhaustion

Anatomical dissection of cadever, lesson 1

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 09:34:00 +0000

it's been a long time since i last wrote here, and i wonder how many of you still watch this space?

just got back from my first disecction of a cadever, obviously we don't get fresh bodies, the cadevers we get are mostly old, homeless people that died in the hospital and have not been claimed. so basically for each group of 6 you get 1 cadever.

the first thing you notice is the smell, because obviously they had to fix the body with formalin to preserve it, and we'll be using the same body for 1 year, and we'll be sharing it with the year 2 students.

this is definitely one of the things i don't want to happen to my earthly remains when i finally quit this world, about 200 years from now (wishful thinking never hurt anyone).

so for the first session, we only had to remove the skin from the thoraic region.

this was done by making a very shallow (just cutting the superficial fascia) incision in a sagittal line stretching from the suprasternal notch above the manubrium to the xiphoid process.

then we cut along the clavicle to the acromion and finally make a round cut around the arm.

the skin was removed, and then the subcutaneous adipose tissue (fat, ugh), and my cadever had the most adipose tissue in the whole lab, as in almost 1-1.5 centimetres thick.

after peeling the skin off, making a sort of windowlike sturcture, then we cut off the skin from the body completely by cutting along the midaxiallary line.

so now we get a clear view of the pectoralis major, the serratus anterior, and part of the deltoid.

and in the deltopectoral triangle (the groove between the deltoid and the superior end of the pectoralis major) we could see the cephalic vein.

basically that's it. and we're leaving it for the year 2s who are going to dissect the muscles.

general impressions:

it's hard to feel afraid of dead bodies in a well lit lab, with over 100 students in it

penises look gross after treating them with formalin, the scrotal sac looks worse, probably going to have nightmares.

ugh

zombie penises......... disgusting

formalin smells bad.

most of the cadevers are really thin, subcutaneous fat almost absent, it's just my luck to get the fat one, which entails the most work.

poor homeless people, at least your bodies will benefit science.

bye, got to go puke now =)

somebody's new album

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 09:56:00 +0000

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4JK472N6

hmm?

i don't know what this is, hmm

seems to be a new album

i don't know

and since i don't know, no one can sue me

but i reccommend it

and you'll thank me

funny wordss

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 06:08:00 +0000

one of the few upsides to being a med student is learing all sorts of weird new words to freak people out with.

like this

monorchid

i suggest u check a dictionary, it's 2:10 and i have a class at 2

scary email

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:19:00 +0000

i just received one of the scariest emails in my life.

it is spam, but that doesn't make it any less scary.

HOPING TO KNOW MORE ABOUT YOU SOONEST

My Beloved
Its lovely reading from you today,How is your day over there and your family members?I hope every body is fine,
My name is Eunice Kofia from Ivory Coast in African,I am 23years old,Fair in complexion with 5.5ft tall,Never married before.
I contacted you on the eu.hku site after going through your profile because what i read in your profile pleases me and i said to my self that you are the right man i needed to spend the rest of my life with,I need a man of vision,love and trust.
For me i am presently living in a refugee camp here in Dakar Senegal as a result of death of my parents which took place doing the war that took place in my country,The rebels attack me and my parents when we are driving down to the air port to board our self to United Kingdom where my late father business is situated But unfortunately for us that very day,The rebels attack us on the way and killed my parents in a cold blooded before my present and when they are after my late father money and properties that is inside the car,Then i escape away from them,From there i ran away to a near by country here in Senegal to reside as refugee in other to safe guard my life on the type of sock i have when they are killing my parents before my presents.
Here my father was a very rich man well known business man in my country and out side the country But i will never tall you further secrets until i hear from you and know more about you and your eagerness to see me out of here to live a better life again,Then i will now open up to you all the secret and foundation my late father planted for me as the only child when he was alive.
I would like to know more about you.Your likes and dislikes,your hobbies and what you are doing presently including some more of your pictures,Then when i see all these,I will now open up to you and tell you the hole secret about me and also give you contact number to reach me ok
God bless you as i wait to read from you soonest,I have attached my picture for you here.
Yours Lovely Baby
Eunice

fu*king scary

awesomeness of me

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 10:19:00 +0000

i'm just too awesome.

got on to the lift with some other random dude that i don't know, and as i was pressing the button for my floor, my finger slipped and accidentally pressed the button for the 12th floor.

which turned out to be the floor that guy lived on.

i'm just too awesome

Fking Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:55:00 +0000

I created a facebook account at 11.35 today

by 11.37, more than 10 people had added me as friends

and i had a message on my wall (what the hell is that?)

people are just too obsessive over facebook

Google Chrome

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 06:34:00 +0000

I'm here to just politely tell you about one of google's new software

Chrome

on which I am using to type this post

it's basically just another browser, still in beta mode

but it runs quite smoothly for me.

just saying give it a run, and it's much faster (in terms of load times) compared to IE 7, or sad to say firefox 3, which was my previous fave browser.

while i still have not customised it with ad blocking add ons so some ads, like the ones on my blog(which i will remove soon cos its starting to really bug me) keep showing up.

and pls msn me or drop me an email

and add me on skype or something.

jhtanmy

will try to fill you in on my life story soon

olympic opening ceremony

noreply@blogger.com (youroldbean) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:31:00 +0000

was watching the opening ceremony in the tv room with some friends.

a sign of how badly my grammar has deteriorated.

speaking only in sentence fragments.

fragments................

anyway, it was very inspiring to see the chinese showing off to the world how the most important inventions that together are the foundation of the modern world, paper, printing, the compass, and gunpowder, were all products (original products) of ancient china.
a far cry from the china of today which is more known for its bootleg exports than original creations.

as a chinese, i'm kinda proud.
the ceremony was well planned, well rehearsed, creative, and nothing short of spectacular.

just one little hitch.
they got a male, most likely european, commentator who was almost completely ignorant about chinese culture, and he didn't even speak good english.
worst of all, he sounded like me, a monotone.

and the female commentator was no better, she sounded like a chinese who took five weeks of english lessons.

seriously, if you could spend so much money to plan a ceremony on such a grand scale, at least get people who can comment intellectually on it.

i could write more, but i just decided to condense my grousings into handy bullet points.

- the olympics are just a chance for a country to shake its weiner in the face of other countries.
- the olympics are not fair to the little guy
- the olympics are a huge waste of taxpayers money.
- the olympics are just another ad campaign for mcdonalds so they can fatten you up, thereby decreasing the likelyhood of another olympics

yob out.

side note on dota
i've been playing invoker and invoker only throughout ver 6.53
and suddenly in ver 6.54, they reworked (read: nerf, but hard) invoker
the cooldown on chaos meteor is now 70 seconds.
deafening blast is now 40 seconds

the other (small)buffs don't nearly make up for this huge loss