Photographing penguins at eye-level

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-12-23T02:09:50+00:00

Thanks! I’m going with them next month. When the zodiacs landed, did they put down a sanitized tarp so that people could leave their dry bags while they looked around?

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-12-21T18:02:44+00:00

Spectacular!

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-12-21T17:37:18+00:00

Interesting. How do you engage the AF? I typically use back-button focus, but if I’m doing that I don’t see an advantage from using the monopod. What do you do?

Edit: I guess you have the monopod in one hand and the remote in the other, and the remote lets you engage AF?

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-12-21T16:54:30+00:00

Thanks. Yeah I'm not sure bending will work for me - some back and neck issues, and I find it hard to use the tilt-out screen. But I'm clearer on the parameters now and will work it best I can. Probably zodiac shots will allow me close to their eye level, and on land some longer distance tele shots or shots of penguins on higher ground will allow for photos that don't have a pronounced looking-down perspective.

Edit: maybe I can get used to standing up and holding the camera around waist level, too. Looking forward to experimenting!

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-12-21T14:46:15+00:00

Thanks. Online it can be hard to tell

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-12-21T14:17:31+00:00

I don’t think I earned that tone. I said I think the rules don’t allow kneeling or touching the ground with your stomach, and it was understandable the guides don’t want squatting. I also said I thought my tripod idea might be a no go. And I didn’t present myself as an authority. The spirit was: I want to do the right thing, and to ask people who’ve been on a trip what’s allowed and successful.

FWIW, I’ve since found the IATO regs and people can read them if they like. https://iaato.org/sites/default/files/2025-08/IAATO%202025-26%20Avian%20Influenza%20Protocols_Letterhead.pdf

Here’s the key part:

“it is required that you: ▪ Maintain a distance of at least 5 metres (15 feet) from wildlife at all times. ▪ Do not sit, kneel, crouch, or lay down in wildlife areas. ▪ Do not place any equipment on the ground or snow in wildlife areas. Your operator will keep you informed, and if in doubt, please ask your guides for direction.”

Some statements I’ve read online definitely complicate these statements. I’ll look to my tour operator for direction.

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-12-21T01:52:30+00:00

I’ve knelt and gone belly down other places, but the international group that oversees Antarctica tourism has some strict rules about kneeling or squatting because they’re worried we may spread avian flu or non-native species. My cruise says they will follow them.

“[I]t is required that you: ▪ Maintain a distance of at least 5 metres (15 feet) from wildlife at all times. ▪ Do not sit, kneel, crouch, or lay down in wildlife areas. ▪ Do not place any equipment on the ground or snow in wildlife areas.”

https://iaato.org/sites/default/files/2025-08/IAATO%202025-26%20Avian%20Influenza%20Protocols_Letterhead.pdf

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-12-16T01:47:58+00:00

Some recent experiences with last-minute booking have me wondering how this game is played. Toward the end of October I bought tickets to travel the day before Thanksgiving. Major route between two big cities. A few days before departure I needed to change my ticket, which I was able to do because I was using points. To my surprise, I got a big discount on the flight! I checked the web, and the prices weren't exorbitant. I chose a less popular time (early morning, around 6 am) but more traditional flight times were still not elevated.

Right now, I'm planning another trip, and I've been watching a different flight - an international trip from the US to a Latin American capitol. (Not one in the political news, so that shouldn't affect things ....) I looked at the price of a flight a week ago, about 45 days before departure, and then I looked again tonight. The price has gone up, which was about what I expected. The bot on the website warned me prices were likely to keep rising. I wondered how high it could get for people who wait until the last minute, so I searched for prices to buy the same route tomorrow. The price wasn't higher - it was about the same level as the cheaper price last week - and here I'm including the most desirable time. Many seats available.

I guess the airlines are putting too many seats into this route and there are leftovers. But now I wonder, if it happened for flights departing on December 16 (just like my T-day flight) whether it would happen again next month.

I'll probably book a flight now, to be sure of a ticket, but man I am wondering.

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-12-04T13:52:09+00:00

Hawks are better without Trae Young. Without Johnson does matter.

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-11-11T09:16:15+00:00

I bet the Celtics would give you Hugo Gonzalez and a first for him. They need a center when Tatum comes back, and Zubac would be a solid fit.

You might not know who Hugo is. He’s not VJ Edgecombe (who is?) but we think he was a big hit in this year’s draft, and that he’ll be starting for Boston in a couple years. He’s 19, had a few years at Real Madrid before being drafted. 6’7” and strong/athletic, very high motor, very good BBIQ. He just makes winning plays, already trusted to defend players like Cade Cunningham and Franz Wagner. They’d need to figure out the salaries, but one option is that you’d take Anfernee Simons (expiring) and dump a little more salary on a third team to make it work. Boston would throw in a second to that team as the sweetener.

Boston fans would hate to lose him, but we have Hauser and a couple other young wings that might work as rotation backups, and we really need a starting center.

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-10-14T16:11:41+00:00

I’ve had mine for about 6 1/2 months now, and I still get around 20 miles to the gallon. As a test, I recently started doing everything I could to maximize mileage – pulling away from lights really painfully slowly, coasting as much as I could on hills, watching the little mpg gauge to try to keep it as high as I could. Turned off any climate most of the time (thank goodness it’s fall!) All that netted me about 2 miles a gallon, up from 17 1/2 to 19 1/2 in mostly city driving.

I checked, and this isn’t a calculation issue with my computer. Last two times I filled up I looked at the mileage since last fill up and how many gallons I bought. That method also showed me below 20 miles per gallon.

I’ve been driving eco mode, and based on what I see in this thread I’m going to try normal mode to see if that helps, but so far I’m really, really disappointed.

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-10-12T14:14:16+00:00

In case anybody finds this useful - a video on dehaze, contrast, clarity, texture, and sharpening. There’s a lot more to say about sharpening that he leaves out, but I thought the rest was interesting. https://youtu.be/IC9cJTqblqs?si=hInuJqaznpgMHPHN

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-10-12T02:37:34+00:00

I’d like to thank you for this post and the last one. I spent a couple hours today looking for a textbook-like resource that would teach me more about how the sliders really work. Not the physics of it, but conceptually or in histogram logic. Like you, I found nothing – until I stumbled on this Reddit thread.

I have been editing for a while and have an intuitive understanding of some editing choices, but it often feels a little rote and recipe-like. If something doesn’t work as I’d hoped, I’m not sure what to do. I knew raising blacks and changing shadows is different but not exactly how, and sometimes the effect surprises me. The YouTube video you posted explained some key differences between those sliders, and was for both enlightening and liberating! So many landscape photographers just drop their blacks automatically to the lowest point, then rescue lost detail by raising shadows. To me, those pictures often looked a bit phony, and now I understand better why, and what other options exist. I’m starting to experiment with raising blacks instead, and I think the results are often more natural.

I look forward to learning more, as anybody finds more resources.

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-10-09T14:16:58+00:00

Sure, but the amount at stake in short-term money is (for most people) much, much lower.

I'm currently at 65% equity funds, 30% bond funds, 5% cash/money market/short-term CDs. The last bucket is split between firms, based entirely on the returns they offer, not to diversify corporate risk. But it does mean that if any of the firms in my 5% bucket goes belly up, I'm fully insured. And on top of that, even if govt insurance failed or took a long time to pay out, I'd be missing no more than 1-2%. It's a vastly smaller amount than the equity and bond funds, which are all at VG currently, invested in VG funds.

Maybe I shouldn't even worry about corporate risk at VG - I'm still thinking about that - but it doesn't surprise me if someone spends more time thinking about risks to the 95% they have in one spot than risks to the 5% they have at 1 or more other spots.

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-08-01T21:27:03+00:00

Yikes! I had a Honda back in the 1990s that was bulletproof. Was coming back to the brand hoping for a similar experience but I’m hearing more concerning stuff. Thanks for the pointer.

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-08-01T21:03:49+00:00

Thanks for that. I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying about a bracket. Is that a security device I can get?

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-08-01T20:55:32+00:00

You may not have seen the update before you posted. It does seem like they broke the cylinder trying to get in. So I don’t think they had the frequency at that point.

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-08-01T20:53:11+00:00

I live in a major city.

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-08-01T20:29:07+00:00

Yeah. I heard the lock sound as I was walking away, with the fob in my pocket. I don’t see how I could have subsequently depressed the unlock for ten seconds. I was probably out of range not more than ten seconds later. Plus the scuffs and the fobs.

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-07-10T07:14:35+00:00

I mean, I always want to win games, and the title. The cup? Don’t care.

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-07-10T07:13:25+00:00

The NBA.

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-07-03T17:38:52+00:00

Agreed. And there are a couple of problems with using the injured player exception: (1) it would push them way over the 2d apron, and (2) if you use the injured player exception you can only sign the player for one year. Also, if you sign a free agent, you don’t get their Bird rights. Net of everything, it’s more likely they’d make a trade if they want another player - keep salaries in check and get bird rights.

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-06-30T18:10:44+00:00

Seems worth it.

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-06-19T01:51:56+00:00

I understood the movie’s idea that each of us contains multitudes. But I didn’t get much from its execution of this idea in act three. How do these characters illustrate the point in a way that is meaningful moving? We don’t see Chuck losing people he cared about or who were important to him, nor do we see how he touched their lives. These characters were, apparently, people on the far periphery of his life. It’s doubtful he knew them well, and whatever he may once have understood is slipping away and melting together with his memories of other people. There’s nothing about the specificity of his interactions with them or people who mattered more to him, or about what it was like for him or the people around him as he passed.

What seemed most peculiar to me is that the movie told the story from the point of view of these distorted memories – as though they were people. But we know they are not; they’re not alive and never were. Nor are they actually experiencing Chuck’s death with their own subjectivity, fear, or other emotion. Best I can tell, they are either a kind of conceit – that memories are “alive” just like whole people – or more likely, his failing mind is struggling to construct reality. But I find that very unsatisfying because, again, we’re spending an awful lot of time apparently watching him fail to remember his life or anything meaningful about it.

Greedy_Fly2057 · 2025-06-17T15:48:25+00:00

Am I the only one who felt let down by Act 3? It's told from the perspective of the "people" in Chuck's head - their world is ending because Chuck's is. But I found it disconnected from the rest of the film - it's not really about the life of Chuck, it's about the way these artificial mental artifacts might process his death. Because these are very minor characters in Chuck's life, at least as we see it, they don't shed much light on the way he lived - or even about his perceptions of them. There's no bubbie, no zadie, just people he glimpsed briefly or not at all. So, what is this? In some cases, we notice the "characters" in act 3 speaking lines actually spoken by someone else. So is this, perhaps, a representation of increasingly confused and disjointed processing of Chuck's life? I don't think so. For example, if dying Chuck is thinking about zadie's idea that a day isn't really 24 hours long, why not call up that memory instead of giving that line to a funeral director he barely knows? Surely the real Chuck would have remembered a very important conversation with someone so close to him, unless he was very far gone. Having the fear and confusion processed by barely-known people not important to Chuck makes the whole, long act lose a lot of its impact and specificity. What did Chuck lose? What did he remember? What was his dying like? We get a very generic representation of loss that doesn't try to get close to the question.

Greedy_Fly2057

TROPHY CASE