ykf

on firefox for me the galleries menu thing does not work properly i can only see 1/8 of the screen in center..

 

nice site though

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I've tested on firefox before and saw no problem... What's the screen resolution you use?

Thanks alot~~

I just updated my website layout and would like to have some comments~~

SamuelPhotos.com

Just drop me some notes so that I can have some improvement. Thanks!

Film is good, but digital is good too.  However, digital turns everything into pixels, whereas film is continous.  We learned a bit of this in my computer grahpics class.  Film has continuous tone, where digital mimics that by prinint with halftones.  I think that film is obviously better quality, and will be a smoother image, but it's not as versatile as digital.  Another good way to improve digital is to up the resolution.  The more pixels per inch you have, the better print quality you have.  I think digital is a bit better, but not by much, and only for it's versatility.  Film still has it's uses.

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Sorry, film is also a digital media, using grains as its pixels. So its really not a continous device also.

I cannot deny that the facts are that digital quality is now indeed better than film in some ways, the resolution bit at least (I don't quite agree with dynamic range), but as I thought through the facts and tried to straighten out my own reasoning of why I still stick to my trusty Nikon FM2 and film, it became more and more convoluted. To spare you the confusion I went through, my final conclusion after talking to other people, is that I choose film and chose film, NOT because it had offered me better quality and resolution at that point of time, but because of the feel of the entire film idea versus the digital idea. I mean, digital quality catching up and surpassing film quality is inevitable. Technology and research for digital continues on whereas nobody is trying to make better quality films. When one side's research ends and the other continues, it's obvious to anyone that one day digital will surpass film in terms of technical quality. That has already been done, apparently, and that I shall not argue anymore.

 

What I wanted to bring up is the idea of film and the idea of digital photography. I'm a great believer of "capturing the moment", of minimal manipulation of the photograph after actually taking the picture. A great legend of the photography world passed away not too long ago, he took only black and white photographs and he never cropped his pictures, because he believed that his photographs are perfect when he took them, that his composition is exactly what he wanted his photo to turn out. I never cropped my own pictures, not because I'm expert like him, but because I believe the same thing. If you have to crop your picture after you take it, there would be a certain lack of photography spirit in how you take your photographs.

 

But I'm digressing. What I really want to say is, the good point about digital is the amount of instant feedback you get. You take a picture, you can see it immediately, and see whether it was okay or not. If it isn't okay, you can go ahead and take another one, and correct yourself immediately. This is great for beginners, but I somehow feel that this instant feedback has created a loss of professionalism, no, the true photography spirit as I see it. Being a film photographer, I know that I would only get to see my photos in maybe a day's time at best. There is no instant feedback. I have to make sure each and every photo counts, because I'm working on film, and I don't carry too many rolls with me. I have to make sure that in one photo, I manage to really capture what I saw and felt inspired by when I wanted to photograph the scene. I have to make sure my focus is correct, my composition is perfect, my exposure is what I want it to be, all these small but important details must be in place, because unless I bracket, I might never get the same scene to photograph again. In a way, this makes me more in tune with the spirit of photography as I see it, as in "capture the moment".

 

There are lots of professional and really good photographers that use digital, and still have this spirit of photography in them, and I respect them. But it's the growing amount of photographers who became good at their art because they know how to finetune their pictures to make it look good, either by digital manipulation after, or by actually on the spot fine-tuning their composition or exposure after the instant feedback that they have, that truly disturbs me, that truly makes me dislike digital photography in a sense. Photographers who truly understand the pros and cons of both film and digital, and then choose to go one way or the other, these are the people I respect. But it's the photographers who were weaned on digital, never touched a film camera before, and believe in the power that higher and higher resolution and instant feedback brings to their art, those are the ones that disturb me.

 

A good friend who runs a photography studio once told me this story. He and his friends were at a shoot, all using film medium and large format cameras. On the other side were these really noisy and cocky photographers, all using super high-end DSLRs (not any of those Hasselbad digital backs though) and basically making fun of the amount of time and effort my friend and his friends were using to take one shot. Feeling slightly irked, my friend approached them, and basically challenged them to use their equipment to take just one shot. Verdict? They were all too scared to even touch the cameras.

 

Now my rant is not towards those people who use digital, only a small subset, the set that basically doesn't know and doesn't understand film, and diss it anyway, just because digital is "better". I'm a person that believes you should never diss anything that you don't already understand, and people who do so disgusts me...

 

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Good point!

And actually your concern is mainly on the person behind who takes photographs, not the tools. Giving an excellent tool to a dumb person, misusing its capabilities wasn't really turns that excellent tool into a crap. Gladly I'm not that kind of person, but really I admit there're lots of them.

The bottom line is the photographer's mind that matters, not the tools.

When I type http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ I get a "There is no website configured at this address" by cpanel.

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You can ping it??

My hosting at Xisto - Web Hosting, samuelphotos.com (69.50.177.114), doesn't responds to ping. dnsstuff ping and tracert confirms that. Please check.Thanks.Rds,Samuel

Parampampam...

 

I should read also other posts of you... sorry - not there - it would be there if you would apply for free web hosting... just ask M^e or Nilsc and they should direct you to right place...

 

one more time sorry...

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Man, I'm using the paided hosting here.... so I still need to apply for the free web hosting?

Hello,I've applied Xisto - Web Hosting account already. In the hosting descriptions of Xisto - Web Hosting, ssh is enabled. But seems I can't connect to samuelphotos.com (my domain) using putty. The shell returns this message:"Shell access is not enabled on your account!If you need shell access please contact support."Pls help.Rds,Samuel

Although it's perfectly OK that the admin is busy, but I doubt there's only 1 person dealing with the whole business, and this I think surely will scare away potential customers...

That means I can't apply until the next week?

Hello, I joined here few days ago, originally planned to get a free hosting here. After posting a few post here, I've found that I'm not feeling quite well for continuously posting just to let my website hosted. I'm quite busy on my works and posting continuously seems not my cup of tea. Since then I noticed Xisto - Web Hosting. After researching, seems Xisto - Web Hosting and this website are from the same company, but for a newbie here, actually I'm not knowing quite well about both sites. What I'm particularly concern is about the stability and service support in Xisto - Web Hosting. Is there anyone here which have hosting in Xisto - Web Hosting? How stable is it? Any downtime so far? You know, for such a low cost web hosting usually stability and support will be compomised. And I'm not very keen on trying something new... Any help will be appreciated.(BTW, I've sent an email to support@Xisto - Web Hosting.com yesterday and so far none have replied. This makes me even hesitate to try it, even though it have 30 days money back...)

Well, if microsoft can really do WinFS what he was originally claimed, then it'll be the best file system since Unix file system. No more directories, file system, totally based on SQL server, catalog using SQL server, can use SQL to query files... etc, really makes me think it's the best thing microsoft have ever invented~~~~~

Can it handle camera raw files? Right now I haven't used any photo management software because no one can properly handle Raw (Adobe Photoshop Album can, but it can't handle my 1Dmk2 CR2 format, so I haven't used that once I sold my D60). If it can handle Raw or Adobe negative format, I may consider using it~

Well, my username is simple, it's just my initials~~ Me, just like szupie, comes from Hong Kong, my chinese name is Yung Kin Fung, so my initials is ykf, and that's my username~~~I also have a nickname called Twister, meaning tonado, in chinese its pronunciation is very similar to my chinese name pronunication. So that's why I'm also called Twister~

Well, first Gb, Mb and Kb in hard disk manufacturar's terms is always x 1000, ie, 1Kb = 1000bytes, 1Mb = 1000Kb, 1Gb = 1000Mb, while in OS terms, it's always x 1024, ie, 1Kb = 1024bytes, 1Mb = 1024Kb, 1Gb=1024Mb, thus the actually capacity is always less than the adventised capacity~The another point is the partition format you use, whether you use NTFS or FAT32 or other formats, added overheads and consume some space inside the hard drive. For example, FAT have file allocation table, NTFS also have it in addition to the security settings. Other formats also have its own overhead. Thus the actual space you can use is always less than the adventised one.

Wow, that close up of the insect is astonishing! Perfect timing too, how did you get that position of it? Also I went to your gallery and those shots of the sunset in the Airport are just so vivid! ...wow

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Thanks~

The technique is to use a twin flash or ring flash, set exposure mode to M mode, f/16 and 1/250sec (or the X-sync speed your camera offers) to ensure that the depth of field is as deep as possible while trying to prevent shaking and any kinds of movement by setting a high shutter speed. Then wait for the fly (yes, that's a fly, but it's not house fly of course~) to feed the flowers... when they're feeding they'll tends on stay still (relatively... after all they still move, but that's easy to fozen it using a high shutter speed). With enough patience, luck and lots of trial-and-errors, you'll finally get it~

Of course, you'll need to have the right equipment to do the job. Macro always needs patience, if you don't have enough of it then better don't play macro~ you'll be frustrated to death~~~

Are you kidding?? That must be some kind of joke...How can someone remember such a long domain?! It's ridiculous~~~

It's look like some kind of stock photos agency which buy photos from you and put them on the web or some other place for the customers to buy. They will get some agency fee for that service. Well this one seems lots of marketing crap and makes my bad impression from them~~~

In the real world applications, usually there will be a requirement gathering stage. After gathering the requirement, the architect will transform the requirement into a set of use cases for the entire system. From each of the use cases, he will built a sequence diagram and/or state diagram if needed. Then based on these diagram the architect will build the component diagram using the some well known design patterns, such as session facade, command pattern, DAO (data access object) pattern, and maybe O/R mapping also. Usually those diagrams and the entire architecture will be discussed with team members for knowledge transfer and maybe further tuning based on feedback from the teammates. A class diagram will then be created from the architecture and code development will then be started. Further refinement will be needed usually in the implementation phase, because usually the first iteration of requirement gathering stage is not enough.

It must not be Java... most probably it's Javascript~

=_=. Different standard altogether na~ I think I don't need to tell you that your photos are good no?

 

Where did you take them and what equipment? I know you use a MarkII but what lens? Especially for the insect closeup. How did you manage to get so close to the insect? Using long lens? Macro?

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Equipment used:

#1: Canon D60 + Canon 70-200 f/4 L @f/6.3

#2: Canon 1D mk II + Canon MPE65 f/2.8 1-5x macro photo @f/16 + Canon MT-24EX twin flash

#3: Canon 1D mk II + Canon 70-300 f/4.5-5.6 DO IS @f/8

#4: Canon 1D mk II + Canon 70-300 f/4.5-5.6 DO IS @f/16

 

I take them all in Hong Kong, because I live in Hong Kong~

For the #2 insect closeup, I use a special Canon macro lens (Canon MPE65 f/2.8 1-5x macro photo) which can take an image from 1:1 up to 5:1. The image shown was set on 3:1 magification. Because the loss of light problem (macro lens always have light loss, the more magification the more loss of light), I need to use a special Canon flash called twin flash, which is specially designed for use in macro photography. These kind of > 1:1 photography is called extreme macro, or micro-photography.

You can have look at this lens and flash at Canon EOS website:

 

MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro Photo

Macro Twin Lite MT-24EX

Your concepts are totally wrong. First if you put the logic in DB stored proc, your program design is not OO anymore... You'll need to abandon all the OO pattern stuffs and UML... etc. THAT's a NIGHTMARE!Second, in clustered environment, it's the app server to handle the configuration, not the EJB domain model or Toplink POJOs. Your applications should be totally transparent to the system hardware architecture, so whether it's single app server or clustered app server it'll still run fine. Only app server configurations will be changed. And maybe some crosscutting concern like Toplink caching, need to set for clustered environment too... but that should not change the code. (But for Toplink I'm not quite sure... I use Hibernate btw )I think the typical design should be:MVC Web layer -> Stateless session beans as a session facade -> DAO -> Toplink/hiberate/JDO -> DBRemember, putting the logic inside stored proc is always bad, except that your application is data-centric.

For transaction control in entity bean, it depends on whether you use CMT or BMT. If you use CMT (container-managed transaction), you need to write deployment descriptor on the concurrency access model for the container to use. This setting haven't specified in EJB spec, so it is now container specific (Websphere, Weblogic, JBoss... all use different descriptor syntax to deal with this). If you use BMT, you need to control it using JTA UserTransaction object, which is obtained from JNDI.

This comparison is funny. It's just like comparing apple to orange.... Will apple wins orange?? Let me say it that way....BTW, Java and flash are completely different things. If you compare Java applets and flash, that makes more sense, because applets is only a small SUBSET of Java. Java includes J2ME, J2SE and J2EE, and applets is just a small part of J2SE~Also, Sun already abandoned applets concept (you really notice they still develops applet since Java 1.2?) because it just don't work, and largely because they don't make $$ when comparing to J2EE.