Photographer Evan Baines Studies How to Make a “Good” Military Portrait

"I think the most consistently interesting thing about this project to me is the tension between the individual and the 'uniform,'" explains photographer Evan Baines to us. Evan has been shooting military portraits for a long time now. And over the years, he's had many challengi…

Homeronymus Bosch

“I’m Bart Simpson, who the hell are you?” – Bart Simpson “Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m the Devil! And you’ve earned eternal damnation for your lifetime of evil deeds, Bart. Spitting off the escalator just clinched it.” – The Devil Last week I got an…

Scratching an Itch

My GPU's fans recently started to malfunction, which means it smells like hot failure in my office while I'm waiting on a new GPU to arrive. In the meantime, if it's not under too much stress, and the room is fairly cool, and the case is open, things work fine. When one of thos…

Don’t Be Afraid! Cleaning Your Camera Sensor the Right Way

On last week's episode of Pro Camera Reviews, we showed viewers how to clean their camera sensor. The audience loved it. And lots of folks have never done it before. It's amazingly simple to do as long as you're not afraid. You should also exercise a bit of common sensor. Both B…

No Photographer Needs to Spend Over $650 to Make Great Photos

With the budget lighting we found, Flashes and Constant Lights can do a whole lot for your photography. We get it; lots of you probably don’t need new lenses or cameras. Instead, you should look at lighting: it allows you to play with photography in a different way. So, we fou…

Saving Mount Wilson

This was last night: And this was just before sunset tonight: From the Mt. Wilson Observatory website: Mount Wilson Observatory Status Angeles National Forest is CLOSED due to the extreme fire hazard conditions. To see how the Observatory is faring during the ongoing Bobcat fi…

Why Live Composite is One of the Best Things to Happen To Cameras

Unless you're shooting with Olympus and Panasonic, you've probably never heard of Live Composite. In our constant search to move away from editing, this is a feature we adore. It means that a photographer needs to think about something beforehand. They need to be very careful. A…

That Gibson quote in full

UK's Socially Distanced Music Venue Shut Down Amidst Spike in COVID-19 Cases

Who could have predicted this, except literally everybody? Also is there a more dystopian serving of word-salad than "The Virgin Money Unity Arena"? The Virgin Money Unity Arena opened in Newcastle earlier this summer, offering live music junkies the chance to see a concert live…

Uber has literally gotten away with murder, part 2.

"The human 'supervising driver' in a self-driving Uber is just a meat-based liability magnet." An Arizona prosecutor has brought charges of negligent homicide against the first human driver to fail to prevent an imperfect "self-driving" vehicle from killing a pedestrian. [...] I…

USPS had a plan to send 5 reusable facemasks to every household in early April.

The White House blocked the plan. At one point in April, USPS leaders drafted a news release announcing plans to distribute 650 million masks nationwide, enough to offer five face coverings to every American household. The document, which includes quotations from top USPS offici…

"What, Me Partisan?"

AnandWrites: This is Bloomberg saying it. Plute-on-plute violence, and true. "Facebook is a red state." If you're a Democrat in elected office and you haven't yet been as tough on Facebook's existential threat to democracy, regardless of whether a child of yours worked there, wa…

DNA Lounge: Wherein the Dazzle Masks are here, the Dazzle Masks are here!

New product alert! Our Dazzle Masks are guaranteed to prevent the enemy from getting a lock on your heading and range! Styled after the distinctive paint job in DNA Lounge's "Dazzle Room", itself based on the "razzle-dazzle camouflage" used on warships early in World War II, pri…

PG&E

This electrical transmission tower has a little problem. can you spot it? Actually, it's not a small problem -- it cost us 16.65 *billion* dollars and caused the deaths of 85 people. [...] Remember that worn C hook? How long was it rubbing against the hangar bracket? The answer…

LOCAL58TV

The schmendrick of all schmendricks.

Woodward evidently realized that he was dealing with a chump, a sucker, a patsy, a galoot -- the schmendrick of all schmendricks. For what it's worth, I believe that there is much less than meets the eye to the most headline-grabbing quote in Rage: "I wanted to always play it do…

Huge swarms of mosquitoes kill hundreds of horses and cows by draining blood

Parts of Louisiana hit hard by Hurricane Laura have been left fighting off hordes of mosquitoes so vast they are killing farm animals by biting them in huge numbers. The animals are dying from the sheer number of bites, which leave them anemic and bleeding under the skin, as wel…

Why I never play video games any more

tl;dr - because sysadminning a console is the worst game ever. Hear about [REDACTED] being released for PS3. Wonder if I can download that. Turn on PS3 for the first time in... a year? Remember that for some reason it stopped being able to connect to the network. Dick around in…

Grocery Can Liberation

PDFs for all the labels are here!

Berkeley Cop Trading Cards

In 2002, Berkeley UCPD made trading cards for their officers so students could get to know their cops. It's been a while, so we updated the initiative. "Sgt Andrew Tucker, who hospitalized four students in 2011. Maybe they asked for it, though: Chancellor Robert Birgeneau called…

Paypal's War on Tardigrades

ArchieMcPhee: Just an FYI that @PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word "tardigrade" in the product name or description. We've contacted them and they told us we should just stop using the word tardigrade. PS This is not limited to Archie McPhee. This i…

DNA Lounge: Wherein there's some press about our lockdown webcast series

Broke-Ass Stuart has a run-down of our extensive set of online events: How DNA Lounge Is Keeping Sf Weird During The Pandemic: The DNA Lounge webcast -- dnalounge.com/webcast/ -- has, for nearly 20 years, been piping audio and video of its live events onto the internet. Now, und…

The Man Who Taught His Sandworm To Talk

"The spice extends life. The spice expands consciousness. The spice is vital to space travel."

"But we know that it was us that scorched the sky."

(Drone footage by Bond Studio)

Greetings from Sunny California

It is 9:45 AM.

jwz mixtape 219

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 219. It is also currently queued up on the DNA Lounge webcast, if you want to watch it in simultaneity. Tiny Stills are on this mixtape, and we have a show scheduled with them at DNA Lounge on Jan 17. Anyone placing bets on whether we're allowed to open…

Recent Movies and TV

Hunters: When I heard about this -- "So, Inglorious Basterds was good, but what if we upgrade that Tarantino to a Jordan Peele?" My reaction was, "Shit, that's all you had to say." And it starts off very, very strong -- but then it kinda loses its way. There's a bit of that Grin…

DNA Lounge: Wherein it's time to Hack the Planet again

Next Tuesday, Sep 15, is the 25th anniversary of Hackers, so we're doing another Cyberdelia! Obviously we'd rather be doing this in person, with the skate ramps and the costume contest and whatnot, but... it's the apocalypse. It's a two-part event: at 5pm PDT, Hackers Curator is…

resize versus orientationchange

Feel my pain: // On Android, "resize" fires on orientation change, but ALSO every time // the on-screen keyboard pops up. (iOS does not do this.) // And changing the document layout hides the Android keyboard again! // So on Android, we must use the "orientationchange" event ins…

100 Days. 100 Nights.

johnogpdx:

Octothorpe keyword "capitalism"

We can't rewind, we've gone too far.

Transition Integrity Project

"In every scenario we ran, we ended up with street level violence, constitutional impass, and complete political and legal chaos. [...] Biden can call a press conerence. Trump can call in the 82nd Airborne. You look like you have a headache, I'm sorry."

Amazon Drivers Are Hanging Smartphones in Trees to Get More Work

Beg For Scraps Or You Will Starve: Drivers in on the plot then sync their own phones with the ones in the tree and wait nearby for an order pickup. [...] Much the way milliseconds can mean millions to hedge funds using robotraders, a smartphone perched in a tree can be the key t…

Arctic wildfires emit 35% more CO2 so far in 2020 than for whole of 2019

"This is fine." Smith also warned that some fires were destroying ancient peat bogs containing carbon that has accumulated over thousands of years, a process similar to fossil fuel burning. Analysis performed by Smith, covering May and June of this year, suggested that about 50%…

Comics

Dear Lazyweb, what's your favorite online comics shop? I've been using Midtown Comics for several years now, and they're mostly fine, but there are some annoyances: They have no recommendation or discovery mechanism to speak of. When I read a review of a new series somewhere, it…

Portland

Portland is about to be national news again because a man was killed here last night. This means that the entire Republican apparatus is going to activate and opine about what happened and what should be done in a city they've never visited. So here is one local's perspective. F…

DNA Lounge: Wherein we've got a new online ordering site for DNA Pizza.

Hey check this out, we've got a new online menu site for DNA Pizza that lets you place orders for delivery or pick-up -- and, for pick-up at least, it does not gouge us into paying 15% to the middlemen! If you order for pick-up, the only fee they charge us is a (small, reasonabl…

These 6 Cheap Lenses Have Great Quality, and Are Under $300

We completely understand that photographers don't have much money right now. Even if you're a hobbyist, we encourage everyone to try something new. Best of all, you don't need to spend a ton of cash. You can try a few things to open up your creativity a bit more. So give these l…

The Analogue Wonderbox Is a Film Photographers Big Dream Come True

Have you decided to start shooting with film but are overwhelmed with all of the choices? Do you already shoot film but want to learn about more varieties? If either of these sounds like you, you're going to love this. A British based company, Analogue Wonderland, has just annou…