[quote=Twardlow]

Wow! Tom all the things you list and fear were a way of life prior to capitalism.

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That is bulls**t, Trump will work his way through the courts and the SCOTUS will overturn the rulings of the lower courts, the most recent bit of outrageousness was the ruling on DACA coming out of California. It will not stand. There should be some way to censure the lower courts which knowingly arrive at findings which they clearly know will be eventually overturned. Trump is only having trouble with lower liberal justices who are doing their political part for the resistance, as these cases make their way up to the SCOTUS he has had no difficulties at all.

Capitalism enabled the world that we have today, prior to capitalism there was no middle class, you had rulers and the elites and you had the poor or surfs, there was nothing else and the population growth was nothing as it was after the arrival of capitalism because the economies could not support growth in population. Capitalism brought us the ability to feed, house, and make life comfortable for billions of people throughout the world, the countries that shunned capitalism lagged far behind in their development both in terms of infrastructure and providing for their people.

The banks had to be saved but probably not to the extent that they were, nor am I satisfied that the FED pumping those same banks flush with interest free money that was in turn invested into financial instruments and equities was fair to the American people. Dodd/Frank only insured the growth of and domination of these same institutions which took our economy down in the first place. Trump's economy is taking care of more people than Obama's ever did, maybe you are right, maybe something bad will come from it, I doubt it, but maybe it could, we will see. But the left's insistence of the end of the world as we know it, the end of democracy as we know it is pure lunacy.

This is one of the dumbest things that I have ever seen you post, first off it is hard to say that the c*******t government of the USSR is still in place in Russia. Secondly, Trump has been more faithful to the constitution than was Obama. If you really feel that our government is about to fall all I can say is that you are bordering insane, just how do you feel that the other 1/2 of the country felt under Obama, with his unconstitutional Executive Orders, his 1.5 Trillion Dollar deficits, and his f**grant violations of constitutional principles and law.

California is also a sanctuary state, wonder if that has anything to do with it, #1 in i******s, #1 in poverty. Open borders is not a good policy perscription for this country.

Well, is deregulation the problem or is the government bailing out the banks the problem. I am a big believer in the theory that economic growth raises all boats, I also believe that if a corporation had to really face the consequences of risk that they would behave in a way that is more prudent. I think that democrats tend to overregulate and really don't give a crap about free markets and don't really understand how to create economic growth, so no, a bunch of regulation worries me. I am not saying that no regulation is needed, but I think that Dodd/Frank went to far and hurt the smaller banks and lending institutions, now what we are left with are these mega banks, even worse than before the crisis. I do believe that the government can adequately guard against another crisis without overregulation, dems often regulate because they think that it is the governments job to be in the middle of and controlling everything. Certainly not in line with the concept of limited government.

In the financial crisis few bad actors paid the price for their corporate mismanagement, their shareholders did in the short term, but many of the bad actors themselves individually walked away with 10's and in some cases 100's of millions of dollars. Holder chose to go after shareholder equity to fund leftwing activism instead of criminal charges against those who created the crisis. The free market punishes bad actors in the long run, when government interferes with that then we don't really have free markets do we, we have government intervention which is much different.

It is what it is, but I also believe that corporations should be allowed to fail, I don't think Dodd/Frank has created such an environment, but hopefully our government will act differently should we face a similar situation.

What you and Frosty are both missing is that the CRA and the pressure put on the banks got the ball rolling, as I said previously in this conversation, however in the end it was corporate greed that took the economy down there can be little doubt about that. Frosty, I read some of the same articles you did and it seems to me that at least one of the ones you referenced here also offered scholarly studies that refutes the some of the claims made regarding government pressure had little to do with it. I am not going to research this issue again, I did years ago and frankly I have lost interest in debating it, I am not retired and won't spend too much time defending my arguments on a photography site, I have other things to do.

Thanks for the advice, I have seen it down here with the naked eye, never through the camera because most of my shots are of flying birds or people or whatever, but I think that it would be an interesting thing to try to purposefully capture in still images, a creative element... I will pay closer attention come summer.

I doubt that was the case last week in MO. I do a lot of BIF and the biggest obstacle I encounter is the balance between camera shake and noise, the balance between high ISO's and Shutter Speed, looking at that image what I see is camera shake.

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Take a closer look at the grass behind the bird, the entire blades move in a straight line, definitely lens shake, if it were caused by wind the top of the blade would not have nearly as much movement as the bottom of the blade and the movement across the entire frame is too consistent to be from a breeze... At least that is my opinion.

Definitly not a focus issue but a lens shake issue, if you look at the tiny blades of dead grass in the dirt you will see a double exposure caused because of lens movement.

The out of focus area on the 8 element might be just a tad better, but it is hard to say, I have never set down and done some controlled testing, I have the lens you have as well in it is a good lens, the Super-Multi-Coated has 8 diaphragm blades vs 6 in the older lenses and of course that is an advantage for the so called bokeh.

I don't often shoot macro any more, but I do have three really good macro lenses that rarely get mounted to my camera because when I do shoot macro I almost exclusively shoot reversed lens because magnifications of 2:1 and greater become addicting, I usually shoot with full tubes at 3:1 when I shoot. I understand that the electronic rings would make it a lot easier but I have also found that old Olympus lenses are great for reversed lens macro because they have a stop down button near the mounting ring allowing you to stop down by pressing the button instead of turning the diaphragm setting ring. Another form of macro that you may consider is lens stacking, reverse mounting a shorter focal length to your existing macro lens so that you can use the auto-diaphragm ring in your macro lens to stop down the shot.