There's a big difference between a 2 million bites connection and a 56 thousand one.
The first, in slow connections and heavy traffic goes seldom below some 70-80 thousand. The second one, in the same situation, often drops to 1 thousand bites.

Some pages are indeed badly designed.

This said: I'm quite shure that most of the Topaz effects can easily be achieved with a max of four Photoshop layers with blendmodes. This is not real tonemapping but edgecontrast larded with rather extreme levels. For the price of the plug-in though, $39, added you get a free copy of the noise reduction, it's certainly worth getting if you're into this kind of effects.

Yeah...The Osmonds. I remember  when the lead-singer started yelling: "Gimme and F..."

Was at Woodstock, no?

LOL

more prophetic seriousness:

Our cities have turned into jungles
And corruption is stranglin' the land
The police force is watching the people
And the people just can't understand
We don't know how to mind our own business
'Cause the whole worlds got to be just like us
Now we are fighting a war over there
No matter who's the winner
We can't pay the cost
'Cause there's a monster on the loose
It's got our heads into a noose
And it just sits there watching

Steppenwolf

  I wouldn't be too critical. After all, pornography and violence are  two of the US' major export products.

Let's hope it'll stay intact, and closed for tourists and collectioners.

Another week without broadband, but this is bookmarked!
A thousand thanks as I love crystals , fossiles and shells!

See the other thread on monitors.
Both are good for gaming but can give you no idea on what colour you really see as it changes depending on the angle of vision. So for photowork they aren't good enough.

Well, there's Gabriel Blackhearted's Girl Next Door...
Apart from that, you can do it yourself (if and only if you don't change the polygon count ) in applications that allow verts to be moved. (Silo, Modo, ZBrush, XSI, Max, Maya, C4D, Lightwave,...you know the bunch).

Problem can be that the V4 mesh isn't created for these changes andonly allows limited changes

The problem is not that tft's are bad, but that there are three diffent kinds of tft's, depending on the panel.

• TN, the cheapest, is also the fastest to redraw the screen. It's the typical gamer tft that you find in every store. Its most important weakness is its vertical viewing angle. Stand or sit in front of it, mopve you head up and down by a few inches and you'll see the colours change. Because you'll never know what a colour really looks like, this kind of monitor is not ok for colour-critical work (which is a personal choice you make, not an obligation for making good photographs).
• IPS has much better viewing angles and is more colour-consistent. But it is slower than TH and often shows shadow-trailing and ghost effects when objects are moving fast on the screen, like in games. It's already much better with the H-IPS panels like the new macs, but still not comparable for gamers.
• MVA, and the most used variant S-PVA  have also better viewing angles and the more expensive ones use 10bit dithering to get better colour transition. They tend to be faster than IPS.

S-PVA and H-IPS are more expensive than TN and, apart from the Apple screens, you usually have to order them from more specialised shops. They can (not all do!) show all colours of Adobe RGB.
TN gamers panels, and most CRT (excepting Barco etc) hardly cover s-RGB.

My standard lens is a Sigma 18-50 f:2.8.
But, depending on whether I go hunting landscapes or insects, I walk around with the Sigma 10-20 (nearly always at 10 and corrected in Bibble) or the Sigma 105 which comes to 1:1.

If I could start again, I'd prefer to change that last one into a Sigma 150 1:1. But, like James Brown sang: " The way I like it, that's the way it is." It'll do.

Great shot! Luck? Luck helps those who know to help themselves. You have carefully planned how to do it, and the result is there.

The shaken image can be because you, logically, tensed your muscles because of the noise.

"He who binds to himself a joy
Does the wingèd life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise."

William Blake

Sometimes it's good to remember there's a life outside the boxes of computers and camera's.

Thanks for sharing.

Ahhh...Ansel Adams... one of the greatest in my eyes, and an example to us all.

He's so famous for his zone-system ( which was in fact a precursor of the digital era ) and for his device to expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights that people often forget what a great photographer he was.

When I first saw his photographs, I was struck with awe because of their full range of tones, and I wanted to know how he did this. So it was thanks to him that I (finally erhaps) tried to understand lighting and finally grasped how light is measured in a camera.
Which, in turn, influenced my drawings.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to start a thread in which everyone who chooses to do so can post a link to a favourite photographer and tries to explain what (s)he likes in her/him?

It's not the question of having that 100GB card in your camera and paste it to an external disk when it's full, but it's the type of storage that makes this so innovative. ALL harddisks will crash. It's just a question of when. And yes, you can play Polyanna and live on a cloud that it will never happen to you.  But those fast rotating disks will crash sooner or later, and unfortunately always sooner that-n you think/hope.
This kind of memory is much more reliable as there are no mechanical parts spinning.
It will be a huge step ahed once it's affordable.

I've had an external HDD crash, and no, it was not connected all the time.
Since then I don't trust them anymore.

I wouldn't laugh.
Many people keep their works on an external hard disk They consider it a safe backup, but all harddisks crash.
Others prefer CD's or DVD's. But home-burnt disks will become unreadable.

SolidState memory, as used in memory sticks and CF cards have an average lifespan of 2million hours. There's nothing mechanical, so no risk of crashing.

OCZ has a 32GB SSD disk in laptop-size (2,5inch) which is much, much faster than the WDRaptor, and consumes as good as nothing.

I agree that I don't see myself putting a 100GB CFCard in my camera in the near future, but for the moment those CFcards, memory sticks and SSdisks are the safest backup or storage you can get.

They say Califormia is sunshine and the beach, and you always bring sunshine with your comments. I like your photo's and you'll certainly be a great coord.
Congrats,

ET