Readyloads are gone.. and some stories about being scared of getting stopped by rent-a-cops

This came up the other day on the photo discussion list at work, where one of the guys pointed out one of the many millions of flame wars on the subject and stated that there had to be one correct answer to the question of how the 1 over focal length rule (meaning if you have a 50mm lens, you need to have your shutter at least at 1/50) applies to digital SLRs with crop-factor.

After I started shooting black and white film and then developing it myself, what was left but to print it myself, too?

When I started out doing portraiture, I did only outdoor portraits during the golden hour. If you don't have much gear, it's great. My first portrait shoot was taken on my Canon A95 and came out quite well. And I did my art indoors with lightpainting...

I'd also like to remind folks to keep backups. See, I'm in the midst of data hell and I only lost one night of sleep over it... and some pictures I took lately.

Why do photographers obsess so much about sharpness? Why are there millions of threads online about which lens is sharper than the other?

What to do when it's cold out and you don't like shooting winterwear.

There's some folks spouting off about the Polaroid situation. It really sucks to lose your primary photographic medium and there's a lot of subtle points to making film that nobody outside of Kodak, Polaroid, Fuji, Agfa, and a few others really know, so there's a lot of uninformed emotional blathering and wishful thinking...

I like to view what people are hitting my site about so that I can make the content of my site more useful. Sometimes, I'll notice a search that seems to ask a question but I'm not sure if I've got a great answer for it, so here's some short answers...

Sigma launches a 50mm f/1.4 lens and Rollei launches a fake-TLR camera with a bunch of LIE thrown in.

I'm moving around disks at home. See, I was getting this vague feeling that my collection of disks...especially the pair of disks that I got in the wake of my last hard drive crash... was getting a little old. And the "CPU overheating" siren on my Linux box went off, so I decided to take that as a sign that I need to shake up my hardware configuration before stuff started smoking...

One of the central arguments of the 4/3rds mount was that digital camera sensors were destined to stay small, thus, a new mount for these smaller sensors, with a smaller lens throat and registration distance so that the lenses could be smaller and lighter, only covering that 4/3rds mount size. Of course, Olympus kinda screwed it up.

London's Metropolitan Police have a new "keep your eyes open" campaign.Guess who the scapegoats are? Well, there's people with too many phones, your funny-looking neighbors... and photographers.

Some pictures of the 2/20/2008 eclipse

There are a lot of half-truths going around about photography. Generally, the various photographic equipment companies spread one or two of them, and then the various photography magazines and megasites play along because they realize that to go against what the photography companies want is a great way to not get access to the latest and greatest for review.