fmueller

No landscapes! ;-)

All landscapes this time. And one landscape plus cat!

Rote Johannisbeeren. Es gibt auch schwarze und gelbe! ;-) Great photo. I want some right now!

Of course Wouter is right, but despite all these vagaries, I'll go out on a limb and say there is no chance you can hire a lawyer to go after this and make out with a profit. If the initial consultation with a lawyer is free, go for it. If not, don't throw good money after bad. Personally I had multiple images stolen on the web. I am not a professional, and don't have a problem with people using them for non-commercial purposes. But if somebody makes money with my images, I feel I am entitled to some sort of compensation. In my case it's mostly images of aquarium fish. What irks me most is if people use photos I took of very high quality fish to sell fish that are simply not in the same league, and would never fetch the asking price if people saw photos of the actual fish for sale. I am not a lawyer, but in my view this is fraud. The best I have got out of those folks was for them to take my photos off their website. The best I have got out of people who took my pictures without realizing that it's wrong was a bag of aquarium plants worth maybe $50. Never any money. I would email the folks who are using your image without permission and see what you can get out of them. But don't put your hopes too high.

Wow! We are picking up speed here. Some great images posted this week. The motorbike is street photography at its finest ;-) One can never go wrong with cats, or with these amazing South West landscapes! I need to get myself back into that part of the world at some stage. The city-scape would fit right in with a little project I am working on right now, documenting every day scenes, especially including currently ordinary cars. The meal looks delightfully disgusting! I love ordering stuff of the menu where I don't know what the name means or what I will get, but I might have passed once I worked out slugs were involved! And lastly, great composition on the fence. We haven't had seven images in a while, which is amazing considering the number of cell phone images that are produced today. But I guess they mostly go on Facebook!

Very nice. Where is that?

I would wager a substantial sum of money that you are going to find out what the catch is if you either read the fine print or accept their offer. Because there is a catch, and I have no doubt it's a big one!

I am always questioning the wisdom of changing systems, because there is really nothing you can do with Nikon that you can't do with Canon and vice versa. But if the OP has a Canon EOS system for digital and a Nikon system for film, it would seem to make sense to buy a Canon EOS film camera to consolidate on one system. It would save not only owning two sets of lenses, but also having to lug around them around!

GIMP curves to boost contrast, convert to B&W, add bunny.

Great writeup, JDM! As soon as I saw this, I was going to post about the 2x Vivitar macro teleconverter, but others have beaten me to it! That thing really was a fantastic device, combining a 2x teleconverter with a variable extension tube. I had one not branded Vivitar, but almost certain to have come from the same factory, for the Minolta MD system. I mostly used it with an MD 50mm 1.4, which turned this lens into a 100mm macro lens that could go down to 1:1 without the need to fidget around with extension tubes. The quality might not have been quite that of a genuine 100mm macro lens, but close enough for me - and at a fraction of the cost!

As a chemist, I can't help but weigh in on the mercury issue. Regarding the batteries, there is zero risk for the user - unless you break open the battery. The reason they were banned is that they present a significant environmental problem when the mercury ends up in a landfill. If you choose to use them - however obtained - it's important to make sure that does not happen, but dispose of them properly. Find some place that collects hazardous materials in your area, even if that's a bit of trouble. As far as the dangers of mercury are concerned when you are exposed to the metal, the problem are mercury fumes. If you swallowed a lump of mercury, it would go straight through you and virtually none of it would be absorbed by the stomach. But a very small amount of it would evaporate in the process, and you would inhale it. The small inhaled amount is the problem. If you had a whole glass full of mercury standing in your bedroom, the effect would also be quite small, because the surface area is comparatively small. If you break a thermometer and spill a small amount of mercury on the floor, and this floor would be an old wooden floor where the tiny mercury beads disappear in the cracks and can not be taken out, that is a much larger problem, because the combined surface area of the all the beads is very large, and hence there will be a lot more evaporated mercury in the air. If you spill mercury, don't run away to avoid contact. Make sure you mop up all drops - even the tiniest little one - and dispose of them properly. You can buy mercury spill sets that chemically bind the mercury and make it harmless. Get one if you work in a place where mercury thermometers are used regularly! Compounds originating from metabolizing mercury pass the blood brain barrier easily, and cause brain damage. Symptoms of mercury poisoning include irritability and aggressiveness. There are anecdotes of an old physics professor at my university shooting down the hallway at his colleagues. After he passed away, his lab was renovated, and they found countless tiny mercury beads under the old wooden floor boards. Last but not least, most mercury compounds are far more toxic than metallic mercury. In the old days, hats would be treated with mercury compounds as preservatives and fungicides. That's why the hatter is mad in Alice in Wonderland. The most toxic of all is Dimethylmercury. A couple of drops, not on her hand, but on her protective lab gloves, killed chemistry professor Karen Wetterhahn in 1997. Dimethylmercury is one of the metabolic products of metallic mercury.

Photography of great photographers of the past is appealing in a large part because, well, it shows the past! It shows things like they were, and no longer are. People won't use cell phones forever. Or they will definitely not look like today's cell phones. Some new technology is going to come along sooner or later. If everybody tries to keep people on cell phones out of their photos, it seems time to take more of them now! People will reminisce about them in 50 years! Case in point, I used to take quite a few photos in the 1980s, and I always tried to focus on people and buildings, keeping cars out of the way. Now when people look at these images, many times what interests them most are the old cars I did not manage to avoid having in the frame.

Nice pond! Unfortunately Koi are illegal to keep where I live. Nice plant also - Acer palmatum dissectum. Can you tell I am a garden nut? ;-)

Canon AT-1 bodies sell on eBay from about $20. Ditch the one with the broken meter and get one that works. If you can't afford $20 for a working camera, I don't see how you expect to pay for film and development. You are asking for 'great exposure', not exposure somewhere around the acceptable range. You won't get that with a broken meter, and you won't get that with sunny f16 - at least not without a lot of practice. That involves trial and error, which will cost you a lot more than a camera with working meter.

Ah, a blast from the past! And contrary to my earlier comment in this thread, today both of my DSLRs (a 20D and a 7D) were bought used via eBay! I think not too many people were crazy enough to wreck their cameras with wacky lens adaptations!