Very nice. I have used photo paper in pinhole cameras to make paper negatives that could be scanned on a cheap flatbed scanner then inverted in PP. i used a Black Cat exposure guide to estimate my exposures. their suggestion of starting with the idea that B&W printing paper is about 6ISO was pretty close.

Will there be an Otter box to fit it?

Sure. I rarely copyright anything. Being from the South, much of our heritage was destroyed or suppressed. So the one thing we can own is picturesque speech. That phrase just seemed appropriate at the time. I was thinking about adding something about the value of throwing chum from the seat of a comfy rocking chair on a covered porch, but thought that would be insulting. So instead I will throw this kerosene on the fire....

Now all we need is a lime and a Harley.

...you put the lime in the coconut and shake it all up...

I'm disgusted, I'm repulsed... And I can't look away.

I spent some early years in Florida living near a retirement community. a "Snowbird" taught me how to spell his home country. C-eh?-N-eh?-D-eh?

Pours a neat glass of Evan Williams, lights his pipe, and kicks his feet up on the porch rail. It's a good night to watch the sharks circle.

Caught in the winderness without a polarizer. At least I had a kit lens with me.

A pilsner is a lager, but a lager is not necessarily a pilsner. Call your tree whatever you want. While English can be a very precise language, in the colonies it is often used precisely imprecisely. English-speaking cultures will forever divided by a common language. ;)

We already got dimed-out by the hall monitor. Hide your stash before the principal shows up.

I wonder if the new machines are "auto exposure" just like modern cameras. So when you feed it something solid it cranks up the magnetron to make really sure you can see what is inside. An Argus C3 is a hefty chunk of metal compared to most modern cameras. I could see that just showing up as a solid white brick on the screen lost amongst the socks.

Those shielded film bags are fun for TSA inspectors, those bags have been used in the past to cover up all kinds of things, so the solution is to roach everything else in the luggage to see through the film bag. If you thought you might have fogged film before, you definitely will now.

I have not had to fly much since 9/11 so i have not had these issues myself, but other countries have been hyper-vigilant longer than we have. To and from Africa. i was warned that the airports in Europe often take extra care examining luggage from flights originating in Africa. So I was told it would be a good idea to remove the film from all cameras, put it in a ziploc bag, and only hold the film bag out for hand inspection. When i got to the USA, the Memphis customs and TSA staff seemed to welcome the idea.

May not be important, but I have also seen the VR units in some lenses cost some sharpness. Not sure what exact conditions cause it, I know on my 70-200 (10 years old?) if I have it on the tripod, and I forget to turn off the VR, I get slightly soft images and it gets worse at the long end of the zoom. It's almost like the VR unit, in the absence of any real motion to counter, does not have a good idle position. So it sits there active, reacting to "noise" in the system.

Also the 50-500 uses those obscenely expensive 95mm filters. compared to the only absurdly expensive 86mm filters on the 150-500. I don't recall if either of them uses little filters in the back of the lens or not.

There are several varieties of coconuts coming from several different varieties of palm trees.

Not a sony user here. since the 50-500 and the 150-500 are pretty hefty lenses and not especially big apertures, would it make sense to favor the 150-500 and take the cost difference and put that toward a fast (f2.8 or f4) zoom in the 70-200 range? that 70-200 is very very useful and would be more compact and lighter to use most of the time when the reach of a 500 is not needed.

I played with a 50-500 a long time ago and what I recall is that it was pretty slow to focus and on most camera bodies it tended to hunt since it is close to the aperture limit of many AF systems on midrange and lower end camera bodies. The updated HSM may have fixed all of that. the 150-500 design has less glass in motion and in theory should give a little faster focus response. you will have to get input from the many wildlife photographers here that actually use one or the other. Enjoy your time with the rental. that really is an amazing lens, but I am not sure I want to lug around over 6 pounds all the time and depend on that for most of my focal lengths once I run out of reach with my "normal" 15-50 lens.

sure seems like something evil. I get lots of adds that changes every time I change the page, but always in a little bar at the top of the window and maybe one in the middle of a full screen of messages and then at the bottom. no pop-ups at all. My browser is set to prompt me for popups and I get none of those on UHH.

I don't have any good suggestions for cleaning virus or malware issues. it is a tedious and complex task. I do this regularly at the office but we just analyze the system to see where they picked it up, then "nuke it from orbit" by formatting the drives and reloading windows and all their applications. Our first responsibility is not to the users, it is to protect the data.

Or if you just need a bigger diffuse reflector surface, use some white cardstock and tape it around the flashhead flip the diffuser down and angle it at 60 degrees. I have used index cards, model release forms, the white tyvek sleeve floppy disks came in years ago, and even used a store-bought lumiquest bouncer on occasion.

How old is the lens? How many shots are in the camera with that lens? I have a kit lens that i got for my D70 9 years ago. There seems to be something in the zoom or focus cams that has finally worn to the point that it is no longer sharp at any focal length. it seems this is a common theme with the modern, mostly-plastic zooms. the 18-70 was built pretty solid compared to the later "kit" lenses like the 18-105 and the 18-55's. The all start off quite good, and with use, start to degrade. If you have another lens try that and see if it fares any better. if you get sharp images at all it is not the camera. you will likely find one focal length in the zoom or one distance that seems to be the softest. I am not a big fan of "brick wall" tests, but it is worth it to see where the weakness is. try to tweak the zoom about 10mm at a time and let the AF do its thing. the repeat the series trying your best to focus with your eye and then compare the pictures. If you are happy with the AF results compared to your best shot using manual, move on to the variable distance issue.

for distances, i would try taking pictures of the patterns on the wallpaper or curtains at about 4-6 feet, then maybe the longest distance in your home, or set the camera on the back porch and try to find something at about 20 feet, then aim it down the street at a neighbor's fence or siding over 50 feet away to use effectively the infinity focus range. When i did that test on mine, it seems i have infinity focus at the long end, but not at the short end of my zoom. at the short end and out to about 30mm, at middle distances it is the worst. infinity is still soft but not as bad as 3-15 feet. I have retired my 18-70 after 9 years and about 60,000 shots. I suspect my 18-55 will last me about 5 years based on what i have heard from other people.

two theories come up in this. one is that the lens wears the most where you use it the most. another is that if you only use the wide and the long ends of the zoom and always quickly slew in between, it will be the middle ranges that are most effected because that is where the speed of the elements is the most and pressures are the most as you quickly zoom past those relatively unused focal lengths. from a purely mechanical point of view, both theories have merit and it seems that the way people use their zoom may make either valid.

We have a lot of licenses for the full boat CC at work. their requirement for connectivity seems to be that the machine be left connected to the internet with the adobe background services running for a a few hours a month. if you are not connected to the internet you will get a popup telling you all the great things you are missing out on. you can ignore these to no harm.

It's fun to see the criteria people post here. I figure i am pretty stringent about culling my own pictures, but with 3 small children, cats, dogs, and a wife, I don't get to throw out nearly as much as i would on my own. so i separate the collections at a pretty high level in my directory structure so the wife has a place for her stuff and i have a place for mine. if i separate the things i do for other people from the stuff i really shoot for myself, that drops my storage about 20 to 1.

These days storage is cheap. I caught an ad yesterday for hitachi 4tb drives for $119. hmmmmm... I make a point to collect all images on my "server" which is just a desktop PC in a "gamer" case so it has lots of drive bays and cooling fans. I have 3 hard drives in it tied to a special controller to create a RAID array. So if any one drive fails, it all stays up and nothing is lost. (server technology on a consumer level) If a drive does fail just replace it with a drive of equal or greater size and it will rebuild itself and restore the redundancy and the speed. this computer is the one i put my cloud backup software on. since i rarely delete anything i want to keep the cloud is purely a restore point, not secondary storage. if the PC is lost or blown away in a tornado (I *do* live in Moore, Oklahoma after all.) then i can get all of it back. Since the cloud service scrambles the data as it is uploaded, they are not storing my pictures, they are just storing bits so i have no worries about data theft.

We insure everything in our lives in America. An external drive of any size is over $100 and you have to act to get stuff backed up to it. It is just as prone to failure as any other hard drive. So why not spend $60 a year to back up your most important files? I personally chose Crashplan, but Carbonyte and Backblaze are good services with a track record and data centers located in more than one place in the US.