So now I need a telephoto that’s autofocus, at least 600mm, maybe 800 or even 1000mm. Here’s a pic I shot this morning of some dude at the Shores goofing around in the small surf on his longboard. He started out surfing it regularfoot but then dropped down to a seated Quasimoto or whatever. I broke out the old Sigma analog 600 f4 and set up with the tripod on the concrete boardwalk. In doing this I quickly discovered — I need to get a modern telephoto lens if I’m going to do any action sports photography. Unlike the shoot at Windansea last week with my Tamron 200 which had plenty of “tack sharp” crispness, these pics were all hit-and-miss. This shot was among the as-good-as-it-gets cetegory:
La Jolla Shores, 11-6-18.
In the early 80’s I was out of high school and toying with the idea of contributing to the at that time many surfing magazines being published. Actually in the US there was only Ing, Out, and Er — which were Surfing Magazine, Breakout Magazine, and Surfer Magazine. George Salvadore, who was the editor at the Carlsbad-based Breakout Magazine at the time told me the formula for shooting surfing. It was this: use ASA 64 Kodachrome “Red” slide film, and shoot f4 at 250th of a second or faster. That was it. Today the technology’s improved so much you can shoot at a much higher ISO and stopped down for a larger depth of field and still get good results. But that’s what you had to do back then.
I do like my antique glass though. I’ll hang on to my 40 year-old Sigma monster 600. You can’t turn that tight focusing collar fast enough to stay on a rider but boy does it look impressive mounted on a ‘pod.
General Atomics Poway drones will multiply in 2018.
Poway Drones
Huge General Atomics Contracts In The Works
by Reviewer Rob
When I was a kid in the early-1970’s and my mom worked for a realty company on Poway Road houses were going for about 20 thousand a piece. Now that things have changed and there’s plenty of million-dollar homes dotting the hills above the Poway valley that economic surge will only grow larger this year since General Atomics is getting $328.8 million for their MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial systems programs. The hills south of Poway Road had undeveloped archeological sites rumored to be replete with Indian burial grounds. Now the drones made there will be haunting the skies over Afghanistan and elsewhere.
‘The MQ-1 Predator is an armed, multi-mission, medium-altitude, long-endurance remotely piloted aircraft that has seen action in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen. The aircraft is used as an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance asset, and can be used to conduct pattern-of-life analysis, as well as targeted and signature strikes on targets.
‘Similarly, the MQ-9 Reaper can conduct multi-missions, and as a medium-altitude range and long-endurance that is remotely piloted. The Reaper, however, is larger and more heavily-armed than the MQ-1 Predator and is used to conduct time-sensitive strikes on targets.’
Maybe San Diego can use some of that aerial surveillance to supplement its dwindling police presence doing traffic monitoring of motorcycle lane-splitting during rush hour.
General Atomics, Poway, is getting big bucks in 2018.
4sale: $195. Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, 1998. This is a signed and dated first edition with mylar wrap on fine dust-cover and is to be sold bundled with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing an interview with the author that preceded the issue of the book by several years. Other ephemera includes the book’s press release from Pantheon. This is a review copy that was annotated and highlighted in various places throughout by the reviewer.
by Reviewer Rob
I should say this is a review copy that was used for a book review in Reviewer Magazine, first of all, and that I was the reviewer who received this book by Random House/Pantheon in 1998. The interview and article in Celebrity Magazine which preceded the book’s release from 1994 were also written and photographed by me. So all the notes and highlights in the book are mine, full disclosure. It’s not an “immaculate” copy, but other than the annotations it’s in very good if not “fine” condition. I enjoyed reading it only once and then shelved it for almost twenty years until now when I brought it out for sale. I think I covered Dancing Naked In The Mind Field in either issue 9 or 10 of Reviewer, I’m not sure, I’ll have to go back and look.
This bundle includes the signed first edition with the dustcover wrapped in clear plastic, the copy of Celebrity Magazine, and the original press release from Pantheon who released the book.
I’m selling all together for $195.
Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with dustcover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with dustcover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with dustcover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.Dancing Naked In The Mind Field, by Kary Mullis, signed first edition in good condition with duscover in excellent condition, $195, sold with copy of Celebrity Magazine containing prior interview/article with author.
by Reviewer Rob
originally from an Instagram post here
Newly acquired: an early Model Contaflex from the German company Zeiss Icon. Looks like the fixed lens version they came out with in the beginning before interchangeable lenses were included. It’s attractive and serviceable in working condition but will most likely be seen as a prop in a photo shoot long before I get around to loading it with a roll of Kodachrome. Although I keep my lenses forever I’ve never been too interested in the antique cameras. They call it progress for a reason.
Automated Picture Displays in Adobe Creative Cloud
by Reviewer Rob
So, I went to a coffee shop last night at 12:30 and sat down, and by 3 a.m. automated a photo gallery in Adobe Creative Cloud for the first time. For two or three years now I’d been lamenting the absence of the standard included autogallery in Creative Cloud and even Photoshop 6 after switching over from Mac to PC in 2010, but then searched online and found I could add the Photoshop auto gallery function from the ‘Goodies’ disc that came with Creative Suite 6. Why they did that was puzzling. When in 2007 a buddy in Ocean Beach SD who lived two doors down and webmastered a BBW site told me all that was required to output a Photoshop gallery was File > Automate I quite literally went nuts. It was like an epiphany that spurned a massive surge in creativity. I credit that and the the discovery of WordPress for content management as being what made everything make sense in web design and were the real starting points for everything that came after for me. Well, there was also that girl from Craigslist in 2005 who showed me how to write an href picture hotlink in html but I’m going way too far in the past now.
Back to my story about last night. For some reason Adobe bailed on auto galleries completely after CS6. I began to think it was a conspiracy thing and that they were in bed with designers that were somewhere selling other applications to photographers and hobbyists who needed a photo management creation system. After reading a couple of Adobe help forums it turned out they were moving it around, first to Bridge for a failed iteration that was plagued with bugs and outright nonfunctionality, and then settling on Lightroom which I discovered last night was a fine version comparable at first blush to what I left behind in Photoshop 6. I even tried it in my CC Bridge before starting up Lightroom and found out the Bridge problems were known issues that got reproduced in identical fashion for me: you download and install a Workspace folder in your Adobe Programs, after which when you click on Output it won’t work, and then upon starting Bridge — nothing happens. The application won’t even start up. So I deleted the Output folders and the app started up again. Back to normal Bridge, back to square one, and still no autogallery.
More Google searching for fixes and part of the way down page one was the entry for Lightroom’s CC gallery output. Viola! Sunshine everywhere, it worked perfectly first time with no downloading and modifying of the app in my hard drive.
Seriously, it was like Adobe was playing some kind of snarky prank on the older users like me that were used to the way things were before Creative Cloud. I still suspect some kind of conspiracy.
Picture from Google Image search: “Adobe Lightroom web gallery”.
Here’s my manual-focus 19mm Tamron f3.5 to 22 that I bought new in 1989 or so, when it was modern technology. I got it down at either George’s North Park or Nelson’s in Little Italy. I forget for sure which it was but I’m pretty sure it was Nelson’s. I loved this lens for so long because of the strange fisheye effect it gave when shooting in crowds. Groups of people could fit in a shot and I never had to walk backward a step to get the shot. So I used all the time, especially in nightclubs with a flash at f8 and 400 ISO, until going digital in 2005. I set it aside ten years ago during the whole switch from 35mm to digital ut I’m going to begin playing around with it again now. Here it is mounted on my Nikon D5200.
One nice thing about this 19mm fixed focal length Tamron is its compact profile. It’s less bulky to carry and it fits well in almost any camera bag space. My heavy digital autofocus 10 to 24mm has a lot wider angle but the thing is almost as long and fat as the camera body it mounts on, so the 19mm’s snubnose profile has its advantages when shooting in a crowd too. I especially like the way the focusing collar is rigid and stays preset no matter how much it gets swung around. All I have to do is get within a certain margin of distance from a subject in some place like a crowded dark nightclub or a wedding reception dance floor and I don’t even have to check the focus because I know at f8 with a flash they’ll be sufficiently sharp. Makes for fast photos and great candids. #oldglass #analog #nondigitallensesrule
Hello old friend: Tamron 19mm fixed, f3.5I like this old Tamron wide angle’s stubby profile.Shot about ten inches away from the mirror, so about twenty inches away from the subject in focus: me. This was believe it or not my main lens for years between 1989 when I got it to 2005 when I went digital. I was so in love with that strange fisheyed effect, especially for crowd grab shots. Haha, something to grow out of I guess.
Now I’m listening to this Sub Pop label sampler in my car CD player.
This is going to sound rightfully dumb, but it is almost June 2016 and this is the very first time I have ever heard a compact disc in my car radio. Don’t bother asking why eithet, but I have never listened to CDs in my own automobiles until this very moment. Crazy, huh?
Twenty or even eighteen years ago I would listen while driving to lots of review submissions that I copied or had been mailed in, but they were always tape cassettes. Then by the mid to late 90’s CDs took over and so did Reviewer magazine as a source of music reviews for new artists and the discs came flooding in. Then cars stopped having tape players and boom boxed stopped having dual tape cassette copiers with CD players. So I guess I got rebellious. I stopped trying, and I stopped caring. I would only sit down with a boom box to listen to a music CD for review purposes and not to relax, or during my ample time while in a car.
Maybe I’m wack crazy but I think I partially justified it by rationalizing the CDs would skip when I drove over a bump.
Amazing but I had never analyzed this before now either, but there you go.
Make Sub Pop Great Again label catalog comp, front.Make Sub Pop Great Again label catalog comp, back.
I was shooting photos in a bar (Casbah SD) and on the street last night with 1970’s Nikon lens technology mounted on my sturdy D5200. Even before I went digital 11 years ago I preferred either 200mm or wide-angle fisheye lenses so this 50mm has been stored in my camera bag with only intermittent usage since like 1991, for a long long time, but I finally decided to break it out for novelty purposes and to begin taking advantage of its f1.4 capability again for low light environments. I like the way things look but you just have to do everything like flash and focus manually of course and not through the camera’s ttl system.
My old school glass.I think this band was called Idylwyld, and that the singer mentioned something about Scotland…50mm, f1.4, about 200th/sec, really high ISOwith camera flash, stopped down to like f8 at maybe 250th of a seccamera flash reduced, at f1.4 and 250th of a sec, I think… lots of Photoshop balancing here…Casbah urinal stickers, at f1.4, manally everything.One of the main reasons to visit the Casbah SD of course is to view the outstanding wall art in the hallway. Here’s one of the posters announcing an upcoming show… shot at f1.4, handheld at ISO 25600 and 250th of a second…
So I finally caved and joined Adobe’s Creative Cloud and bought into their downloadable suite of apps. I’m going to try it month to month at first but I’m pretty sure it’ll only take a few weeks before I want to save $25 per month and go for the one year subscription.
I don’t really like being tied to the internet for my apps though. I feel like I’m being watched too much. I want the privacy of having stand-alone software. But change with the times I must.
Thing is it takes forever to download this stuff! The initial manager app was relatively fast — at least the monitor bar was visibly moving — but after installing Photoshop as the first one inDesign taking an hour and it’s only 10 percent complete.
Still there’s a lot of packages here I want to use. Premium video editing, Lightroom, Muse (whatever that is)… there’s like over half a dozen things on this list that I’ve never opened before. But first I have to get them downloaded.
“WE ARE MOVING TOWARDS DEVASTATION…”
TALK TO THE CYBER SECURITY MASTER
GET A PREVIEW OF 2016’S
CYBER PREDICTIONS
CYBER SECURITY EXPERT: Michael Daugherty, is a Senior Writer for Cyber Defense Magazine and is a Board Member at Snoopwall the powerhouse cyber-security firm. He is author of The Devil Inside the Beltway: The Shocking Expose of the US Government’s Surveillance and Overreach Into Cyber-security, Medicine and Small Business.
Last year I quoted late, great sage and Hall of Fame baseball player Yogi Berra. Yogi once noted, “It’s tough to make predictions especially about the future.”
Fortunately, for me, mine for 2015 were accurate. And so I will venture out to again make predictions, many of which should be considered warnings, for 2016 — as I remain all the while cognizant of the words of the Chinese philosopher La Tzu that “those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict don’t have knowledge.”
So here are my cybersecurity predictions for 2016:
1. The Internet of Things will increasingly be exploited by hackers. With more and more products including cars, refrigerators, coffee makers, televisions, smartwatches, webcams, copy machines, toys and even medical devices being connected to the Internet, the Internet of Things will become a prime target for hackers to exploit in many ways.
2. Ransomware, whereby hackers take control of the data in their victims’ computers, encrypt the data and threaten to destroy the data unless the victims pay a ransom has evolved into a bigger problem than many people may be aware of because many of the victims of ransomware do not report the attacks out of a concern as to adverse publicity. Companies of all sorts and governmental agencies have become victims of ransomware. The sophistication of the malware used as ransomware makes this a tremendous threat. In addition, while in the past ransomware has been used primarily for financial extortion, it can be expected that terrorists and others may use this malware purely to attack a target and destroy its data without any financial purpose.
3. As more and more data migrates to the cloud, hackers will focus their attention on infiltrating the cloud. As so often is the case, the cloud may be more vulnerable due to the security measures used by the people and companies using the cloud rather than inherent security weaknesses in the companies providing cloud services.
4. ISIS and other terrorist groups will attempt to conduct cyberwarfare including trying to attack vulnerable computer connected infrastructure including energy facilities.
BIO: Daugherty is a government whistleblower by necessity, and CEO of a cancer detection laboratory by trade. A small business owner taking on federal agencies with courage that rivals David meets Goliath, Michael is on a tireless crusade to honor his constitutional rights and the rights of every U.S. citizen. Michael s story of victimization by a cyber-security company linked to federal agencies is not unique that he s telling his story is. In a play-by-play account of questionable government practices, Michael reveals his chilling tale about how our security is not the safety we think it is. His book The Devil inside the Beltway is a must read for anyone who values freedom or takes it for granted.
