I have and still use an XSi. I intend to upgrade this year, but will keep the XSi as a back-up. The reason I'm looking to upgrade is that the low-light performance of this camera is not great. I would think that would be an issue for astronomical photographs. ISO 400 is noisy, and if you use 1600 (the highest it goes), you'd better embrace the grunge.

All the old ones I used to gripe about so much are now all gone, and I wish they weren't.
Of course that makes me the old fart the younger ones gripe about, so maybe they're thankful!

When I heard the news, I left my junior high to go pick up my little brother from elementary school. I don't think I had permission, I just did it and no one stopped me. When I got to my brother's class, his teacher (a big, burly man) hand his head down on his desk and was sobbing.

The Spanish lisp originated once upon a time when a prince had a lisp. The courtiers, not wanting to embarrass him, all affected a lisp too. The lisp became a status symbol because all the courtiers were doing it, so everyone else started doing it too. Add a few hundred years and everyone in Madrid does it. It's prevalent in other parts of Spain too, but most noticeable in Madrid.

Caveat: I lived in Spain for about three months in 1987. This was the tale I was told by the people I worked with. I have not done the research to verify it.

So they need this info to do a direct deposit. Alternative would be to have them write a check.

If you're paying by check, this is all information printed on the check. It's how they can identify your account to the bank, and without it, they cannot process a claim against your bank account. Any time you write a paper check, you're handing over this information.

If you're not paying by check or using a direct payment from your checking account, they don't need this info.

My mother was near-sighted all her life. When she had her surgery done, she went for distance vision so she wouldn't have to wear glasses all the time. She never did get used to putting glasses on to read, and wished she'd done it the other way around.

I have had this done. If you go for option three, I suggest getting the distance lens in the eye you use for your camera. If you're normally left-eye dominant, that would be problematic, however. The advantage to having one eye long and one short is that, in theory, you can do anything without glasses. In practice, you need glasses. The advantage to option one or two is that you only need glasses for one kind of activity, not all kinds.

My 2p, YMMV, and any other disclaimer you can imagine.

Dogwoods are not native to California, and ours just kind of hangs in there from one year to the next. Most years it doesn't fruit. This year, in spite of fires and heat waves and toxic smoke, it has a great many fruits on it. If you have no dogwoods in your part of the world, the berries are about half an inch long.

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My nephew taught English in China for many years. He said there were two problems that made it frustrating.

1. The educational system teaches students to be passive. The model is that the students are receptacles for the wisdom imparted by the teacher. Only you can't learn a language without participation.

2. Most of his students didn't really want to learn English. What they wanted was a sticker on their diploma that said they'd taken English classes, because that would get them higher paying jobs.

And that's how you get interesting interpretations of the language in Exhibit Neewer.

I have a ten-stop ND filter (don't remember the brand) and... it's not ten stops. It's somewhere around nine stops. Maybe the more expensive filters are more accurate, but the odds of them being perfectly accurate are limited. So whatever you do will require some experimentation to get the exposure right anyway. Any calculator will only get you in the ballpark.

You don't need a calculator, only a piece of paper and a little time before your shoot.

1. 1/125 f/2.8
2. 1/60 f/4
3. 1/30 f/5.6
4. 1/15 f/8
5. 1/8 f/11
6. 1/4 f/16
....

keep going until the time column is as long as you like. You can go to minutes or hours if you like.

Now, when you meter, you can find your nominal exposure in your chart and count down until you add the number of stops you need. In the abbreviated chart above, if you meter at 1/125 sec, you can add five stops by going to 1/4 sec. 1 + 5 = 6 and the sixth column says 1/4 sec. If you wanted two stops and your nominal exposure was 1/6o (column two), then column 2 plus two stop = column 4 = 1/15 sec.

If shooting film, reciprocity failure sets in after some seconds (I no longer remember how many) and all bets are off. In digital your problem will be noise. As the camera heats up, the noise will get worse. For my camera (which isn't very good about noise), anything beyond a minute or two is too long. If I needed longer than that for something like a sky picture, I would have better luck taking multiple 30 sec exposures and blending them in PS.

I walked into the kitchen and spotted some Dark Galaxies that my wife picked a few days ago. Here's a grab shot of what they look like ripe:

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There are a couple on the vine that are nearly ripe. I'll post another pic when they are.

This year our troubles are not grasshoppers. Instead we have deer (we are -not- in a rural area), an unexpected heat wave that cooked many tomatoes on the vine, and lately air so smoky you can chew it. 2020 is not our best year, for the garden nor for much of anything else.

Growing a new (to us) kind of tomato this year, called Dark Galaxy. (And here you thought this was supposed to be in the Astrophotography section.) It isn't prolific, but it's cool to look at. When ripe, all the green parts turn red, but the dark upper part stays dark. Tastes good too. This little tomato was about two inches wide.

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