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Author Topic: Thanks very much Michael & staff  (Read 4291 times)

JJP

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Thanks very much Michael & staff
« on: December 27, 2005, 08:50:32 am »

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and may your website prosper even more during the up and comming year.


PS.  If I may, I've never been to the Antarctica, but have heard on the news and in magazines that the ice bergs and land ice can be many hundreds of meters thick.  I'm very curious to know what kind of scale in "Ice Cracks" were talking about?

thanks again,
jules
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JJ

michael

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Thanks very much Michael & staff
« Reply #1 on: December 27, 2005, 09:03:36 am »

Thanks very much for the good wishes.

99% of the Antarctic continent is under approximately 10,000 feet of ice – containing about 70% of the world's fresh water.

The iceberb in "Ice Cracks" was floating in a bay, having recently broken off a glacier. It was about the size of a small building, and the height as seen was about 30 feet.

Michael
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chapmandu

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Thanks very much Michael & staff
« Reply #2 on: January 02, 2006, 05:31:20 pm »

Just like to second the sentiments above.  I think that I've got more out of this site in the few days since I discovered it than the rest of the internet put together!  It is so nice to get away from the technobabble and back to what the technology actually means in terms of photography.  As soon as I read the first paragraph of the EOS 350D review I knew I was onto something:

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With apologies to General Motors – the isn't going to be your father's camera review. Frankly, over the past year or so I've become bored with both reading and writing traditional camera reviews. The endless listings of features and specs hurts my brain. And, these tell me almost nothing about how suitable a given camera might be as a device for taking photographs.

And the learning to see article just reinforced that opinion:

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Why then do the majority of photographers, magazines and enthusiast web sites concentrate almost exclusively on gear, secondarily on technique, and hardly at all on how to see? The answer is simple – it's easier.

This is something I see in two other areas close to my heart, and of which I have far greater understanding, that of the life sciences and computing.  In science, there are always people striving to perfect and optimise to the n'th degree a particular technique, without appreciating the actual practical benefit of the technical improvements they are making, and whilst missing an alternative approach if only they had thought broader, and not narrower.  Likewise in computing people devote hours to academic discussion of how such and such a configuration might outperform another in a particular benchmark, without consideration of the impact this will actually have on the user, and what he or she is actually trying to do in the real world.  As in the second quote above, the answer to this is that it is of course easier to make iterative improvements to something is already understood, than it is to think laterally and creatively.  Being creative is hard, whether it be in the field of photography, computing, or science, but hell is it more exciting than megapixels, megahertz, or megabases....

Many, many thanks for providing such a useful resource.
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