In 1850, a farmer found a secret village. It was later determined to be older than the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Archeologists estimated that 100 people lived in this village named Skara Brae, the "Scottish Pompeii." The houses were connected to each other by tunnels, and each house could be closed off with a stone door.
@Archaeo-Histories I remember from a documentary I once saw about this site (with caveats for a faulty memory) that at a time when people were mostly nomadic, only two (known) places existed in Britain where people lived permanently: near Stonehenge(*) and in Skara Brae and other people may have travelled north and south between them.
What I thought was the most interesting detail is that when you enter one of these stone houses, the wall opposite the door has shelves inset in the stone wall, clearly intended to show off prized possessions to visitors. We have not changed...
(*) edit: near where Stonehenge would later be built.
@gidi If I lived in one of those houses, the shelves would be partly for show and tell, and party for dumping whatever was in my pockets from the day, especially stuff I'd need the next day. I guess they didn't carry around house keys, though.
And if you go there in the evening, just as the sun is turning golden and nearing the horizon, you’ll find the grassy dunes just outside the village absolutely covered with rabbits. Very bouncy rabbits, which leap away as you get near, so that suddenly the whole ground in front of you suddenly becomes a brown furry carpet, undulating and rushing to one side, as they make their escape.
_This_ is what they based "The Bard's Tale" on? I mean, that was a city with dungeons under it, not an entire underground city, but it was definitely called "Skara Brae".
Skara Brae was the name of the town in the original commodore 64 Bard's Tale game - my absolute favorite game growing up. I never had any idea the name wasn't invented until this moment.
Two 'Whoa!'s: first that I apparently forgot to mention here that Siena Agudong will lead the upcoming film for tubi called Sidelined: The QB and me, playing Dallas (the cheerleader, not the city).
Second 'Whoa!' today is that Mia Shanks is joining her in that film as Emily. Mia is a singer and actress who may be known as the daughter of Lexa Doig (Andromeda in Andromeda) but she is now making her own mark. #SienaAgudong #MiaShanks #SidelinedTheQBAndMe #TheQBBadBoyAndMe
My first talk at H.O.P.E. "Inspiring the next next generation of hackers" Presented with my friend Corbin, it was really fun! I've been able to meet many influential friends at H.O.P.E. and can't wait for the next one this July!
So when I went from 2GB of RAM for postgresql to 1GB and at that same time Pleroma search went from responding fine to not functioning at all, this was not a coincidence? I'm in that majority...
But still, why is loading a remote user to follow even implemented as a search action. Mastodon anti-pattern...
Also vast majority of admins not having enough RAM to store the search index, and not knowing they need it because they've never dealt with actual database load before.
I was checking because I received a package containing 1 of the quantity 2 I ordered; I was not expecting the quantity of 2 to come in separate packages and assumed something had gone wrong.
Just back from walking around in Venlo and taking some photos, just because I hadn't been there before. The city centre is nice enough and there are some historic buildings to see, but it's very small and since there was no guide online or available locally, you can only find the major sites.
The city seems ideal for shopping and drinking at an outdoor cafe, but is not really suited for someone walking around alone like me. The only place you can have a sit down for a bit is next to the river, which is a nice enough spot.
I don't know how street photographers do it, but in my experience people become hyper aware when they see a photo camera, so nice shots of what streets full of people look like are difficult. Buildings it is then.
"Stadhuis", the historic City Hall of Venlo, is really just a block in the middle of the city... Here exaggerated by a wide angle lens. First photo is the back, the second is the front with the cafe's, shoppers and the grand entrance. Weirdly the tower on the right front corner is indeed taller, that's not distortion of the photo.
Where the river Maas meets the city Venlo, a figure stands tall to protect the city from the water. On the inland side of the embankment, people relax in the sun. I think this area is called Maaspoort.
Testing my new ultra wide angle lens. This is at 10mm (field of view equivalent to 16mm), the view is so much wider than by eye.
I wasn't paying much attention to the exposure, was also getting a bit late in the evening since I had to cycle around the forest to get to another entrance. #Photography
I notice that as long as there aren't many shapes for which your brain has much reference (like rectangular buildings) an ultra wide angle lens can compose nice pictures, else the distortion can be obvious and sometimes distracting. Something to keep in mind.
Found my excuse why I haven't been running lately: the forest is flooded! This is the path where I normally run, many others were completely blocked too.
Absolutely great to see Hayley Squires in this week's Inside No. 9 "Curse of the Ninth". She was brilliant and stealing the show as always as Devonshire. themoviedb.org/tv/61746-inside…
I was checking out photo camera lenses since Canon has extended their range of RF lenses. I thought it would be interesting to get a macro lens, which was followed by me looking up 'what actually is a macro lens', which seems to include a minimum focusing distance of under 30cm. Turns out the two lenses I do have, which are not marked as macro lenses, are as good or better at macro than lenses especially marked as macro (30cm for the 50mm one, 17cm 12cm for the 18-150mm RF-S one). So I'm getting an ultra wide angle instead (10-18mm RF-S), because that is something I'm missing with buildings and stuff being too big or the streets next to them too narrow. A lens which btw will also out-macro the macros, focusing at 12cm I think 8cm in MF. #Photography
The film X with Jenna Ortega is going to be in cinemas again for one day only in a nationwide fan event on the 18th of June. They don't specify which nation, but I can guess. See their insta post. You're also going to get a sneak peak at the third film in the trilogy, MaXXXine. #JennaOrtega #X instagram.com/reel/C7y28UVsUkF…
Kiran Sonia Sawar is an actress who let's you feel the emotion of the character and the situation so deeply. She's been underrated for so long, it's good to see her in TrueLove doing a major character for a change. Just saw the final episode. #KiranSoniaSawar #TrueLove
As an urban landscape photographer concerned with architecture, I make a extensive use of what are called "shift movements", which are supported by certain cameras/and or lenses. Shift movements are used to avoid introducing geometric distortions (particularly of rectangular objects) that would otherwise be caused by the camera's position with respect to the subject
Suppose we want to make a photograph of a building. We set up our tripod on the sidewalk across the street (which is as far back as we can go) and select a lens for a composition that fills the frame with the building's facade.
We find we have to tilt the camera up in order to get the subject fully in the frame.
In this example, I'm using a 40mm lens (on a 645 format sensor, so that's about like a 26mm lens in 35mm terms).
The subject is the Russian News Agency office near DC's Dupont Circle, a mansion built in 1912. It's not a particularly interesting building, and there's a car annoyingly parked in front, but it will do for our purposes here.
You'll notice the building seems to be falling backwards. The two sides of the building, which are parallel in real life, are converging toward the top. 3/
What happened here? Why doesn't the front of the building look rectangular, the way it does to our eye (and is in reality)?
The problem is we had to tilt the camera up, so it's not parallel to the building. That means the lens projected a distorted image of the building onto the sensor. The top of the building is effectively farther away from the (tilted) camera than the bottom is, and the image correctly reflects that. But it's almost certainly not what we want.
So what can we do to make a photo that correctly reflects the true geometry of the building? We have four options:
- Correct the image in post-processing.
- Move. In particular, move UP, so we can point the camera straight at the building, centering it fully within the frame. This may require being improbably tall, and using a gigantic tripod. Probably not practical.
- Use a wider lens, so we can point the camera square to the building and still show all of it.
Post processing to fix the distortion seems like an attractive option. Modern image software like Capture One and Lightroom have the ability to do geometric transformations on the frame that can correct this kind of distortion.
I used the Capture One "keystone" tool here. It effectively squeezed in the sides of the frame from the bottom, leaving the top as it was.
It's pretty close to the geometry of the actual building.
There are two problems, however. The geometry isn't quite perfect, because the original camera position wasn't actually parallel to the building. The transform can't fix that. It's very close, however, and probably not something someone would notice.
The bigger issue is the transform discarded over 30% of the pixels in the original frame. We have a smaller image than what we started with. Notice how the image looks cropped compared with the original.
Our next option is to move the camera up, so that we can aim the camera parallel to the building (avoiding distortion), but still keep the whole building in the frame.
This would be great if we could do it. Maybe put the camera on a drone. Or hire a bucket lift. Or just be really tall.
this would also provide a dramatically different perspective on the ground level, showing more of the (top of the) car, the sidewalk, etc. But that might actually make it easier to crop out the car from the shot.
Our next option is to use a wider angle lens, so we can keep the camera aimed straight at the building (again, avoiding distortion) and capture the whole subject.
Here, I replaced our original 40mm lens with a 23mm lens.
The building looks good, but what a crappy composition. The big street in front is really distracting.
Since the wide angle image (with the crappy composition) includes a perfectly good undistorted view of the building, we can simply crop it to create a better composition.
Unfortunately, this is less than 40% the size of the original frame. We got a much smaller, lower-resolution image this way.
Our final option (saving the best for last here) is to use our original 40mm lens, but keep the camera parallel to the building and compose the frame by "shifting" the sensor away from the center.
Shift movements require a special camera (or lens mount) as well as a lens that projects a larger "image circle" than required to fill the sensor. For example, 645 (medium format) sensors need about a 66mm diameter image to cover the frame. Lenses for shift project a larger circle than that. 11/
View cameras (the kind with a bellows that make the photographer look like they're from 1890) and "technical" cameras (like the Phase One XT that I use) have shift movements built in. Most other cameras don't, but a few DSLR/mirrorless lenses from Canon, Nikon and others have shift controls built in.
Here, I used the original 40mm lens, but I shifted the sensor down from center by 12mm. This had the effect of moving the frame up, centering the now undistorted building.
There are two disadvantages to using shift. The first is that lenses tend to be sharpest near the center, and so by shifting the sensor you may be recording a less sharp image. Very good lenses designed for shift have to meet very stringent performance requirements.
Which brings us to the second potential disadvantage. Cameras and lenses that support shift cost a ton compared with those that don't. They also weigh a ton and take up a lot of space, and are designed to be used on a tripod.
Whether it's worth using a system with camera movements, as opposed to correcting in postprocessing, is a balance of tradeoffs. These photos took about an hour to make, requiring careful setup (and I could have done better with more care). The equipment is expensive, heavy, and cumbersome.
It's only worth using this kind of gear if you need the particular qualities that camera movements provide. For most photography, it's likely to just get in the way.
Thank you for the thread. In theory I understand the technical side, but in practice it always feels a little bit like magic that moving a lens by relatively little physically (eg, 12mm in your photo) has much of the same image effect as moving the camera much more to be high up on a giant tripod.
(And I guess that a higher camera position would make it so that the photograph was looking down on the parked car, instead of being relatively level with it.)
Production notes: I didn't aim the 23mm image (that got cropped) quite as carefully as I might have; the camera was vertical, but slightly off-axis with respect to the building.
Because we're only concerned with geometry here, I didn't spend much time fiddling with the contrast or exposure. I'd probably make them a hair brighter if I were actually making a serious photo here. And also wait for that damn car parked in front to move.
The building, at 1706 18th St NW in Washington, DC, is an annex to the Embassy of the Russian Federation (and so it's a diplomatic property). The building was originally a private residence, but was sold to the Soviet government in the 1950's. It's currently mostly unoccupied as far as I can tell, but has been used to house state media offices (such as Soviet Life magazine, back in the day).
Addendum: If you're interested in "formal" photo composition, especially for architecture, it's EXTREMELY useful to understand the concepts of zero, one, two, and three point perspective used in drawing and painting.
Students of painting and drawing have to work hard to master using more points of perspective convergence in their compositions. Students of photography, on the other hand, have to work hard to master using fewer.
I’m reminded that there was a time (my time, but who’s counting) when it was routine, for boys, anyway, to be taught mechanical drawing in high school, including isometric and perspective views. My sense is that this is no longer the case, except perhaps tech-specialized schools. And even then, there’s something about working it out yourself with T-square and triangles…
A couple people have asked about my camera setup and how I travel with it. Warning: Long equipment-centric thread follows.
I mostly use the Phase One system, which is built around a very flexible medium format (54x40mm) interchangeable-back sensor mount. This allows me to use a variety of different cameras (DSLRs, technical field cameras, or full view cameras) and lenses. I usually shoot with the “XT”, which is a small (as these things go) field camera with horizontal and vertical movements.
For a while I considered getting the Canon EF-mount tilt/shift lens, but my vision is really not good enough to focus manually and I realized I wouldn't use it enough to be worth the expense, since most of the photography I was doing at the time was either radio towers or the cramped interiors of transmitter buildings. There are only a few transmitter sites that are architecturally interesting, and fewer every year.
i do like your phrasing "shifting" the sensor, in comparison to the normal lens shift. You're selecting where within the lens's image circle the sensor sits.
is there also the risk of inadvertent distortions elsewhere? The car looks ok, but I wondered if it would end up looking stubby, if the bottom portion of being pulled in.
Obviously use shift. Post looks odd, moving upward would be fine if you had a helicopter, a wider lens includes the photographer's toes, while shift just moves the image circle. This is assuming of course the circle of "good" quality is big enough. imho
“the way it does to our eye (and is in reality)” bothers me. The top of the building is after all farther away, and *should* look narrower, no? (how much narrower depending on how far away we’re standing). A fully shift-corrected image from very close feels a bit wrong to me, the building looming in a way that it does not IRL (again, this is highly dependent on distance from subject). (Huh, digression: interesting ambiguity of “subject” here.)
I think in order to get the effect, you would need to take several pictures. If you move the camera above the ground to take the picture, different depths shift different amounts in the image as compared to the ground image. You can take several images laterally at a fixed range to determine how much each part of the image shifts to identify its depth, and then shift each part the appropriate amount depending on its depth to achieve the desired perspective.
If you move sideways, objects at a longer range shift less. To compose a picture from an artificial perspective, you identify the range of each part of the image and then shift each part an amount dependent on range. The image can be tilted using the Scheimpflug principle but few cameras support this. Or you can it be done by processing together several images.
@profdc9 The Scheimpflug principle has nothing to do with shift. It's used to calculate angles for tilt and swing to keep things in focus on planes that aren't parallel to the sensor.
The image of each 3D point in the 3D space of the object defined by the lens law with the projective coordinates origins at the entrance/exit pupil positions. You can move the sensor to coincide with the building face, you can tilt the sensor to try to compensate for perspective projection, but you can not move the entrance pupil up above the ground. An image can be synthesized for a different entrance pupil from a true 3D estimate of the object (barring obscured surfaces).
@mdwray Swing and tilt movements, also found on view cameras, are used to solve a different problem (maintaining focus on across a different plane) from shift movements. Shifts are used to allow you to maintain the geometry of the subject. That's what the thread discusses.
@brooklyn11211 The reason shifting lenses are so expensive (compared with an equivalent non-shifting version) isn't so much the shift mechanism, which is fairly simple, but demands on the lens itself. A lens designed for shift has to project a larger "image circle", so that the sensor can be moved around the projected image. A regular lens only has to project a circle that covers the sensor from the center.
A shift adapter will only work with lenses that already have a large image circle.
@brooklyn11211 You'll notice that most of those shift adapters take medium format lenses (Hasselblad, etc) and allow them to be mounted on 35mm format cameras. Medium format lenses have a large image circle compared with 35mm format, so this allows room for shifting.
Dafne was on The One Show (BBC) promoting The Acolyte. I caught only the last minutes of it (and the on demand viewing is geoblocked), but the show posted these pictures to prove it. I did learn that Dafne got an especially small light saber because she's short and kept hitting the ground with the normal sized one. #DafneKeen #TheAcolyte
I thought I had recorded the 1990 version of The Witches, but it turned out to be the newer 2020 one. Having watched it, I'd still much rather would have watched the older one... #TheWitches
She posted the short caption "Instagram", so I repost similarly... Apparently she had a day off from filming and posted some scenic shots of Ireland. Link above. #JennaOrtega
But anyway, we need more things with Stephanie Leonidas in a leading role. She's way too good an actress for all that supporting role, guest role stuff. And then they need to actually release the films to all countries instead of keeping it in the UK/US. #StephanieLeonidas
Stephanie Leonidas posted some photos of an upcoming film of hers on Twitter and Instagram. The posts don't say which film, but she captioned it "Donna", which according to imdb is her character in 5lbs of Pressure. #StephanieLeonidas #5lbsOfPressure
Ok, got a message from Instagram that they are going to put my data into AI (presumably to decrease the I). There's a link somewhere in the message that you have the 'right to object'. Obviously the link is a dead link.
The form now works. That is, the link to the form works. You need to enter (required) how being ingested into AI affects you, so I wrote some stuff. Then you also need to enter your country and email. They send a code to the email, which you need to enter. Then they tell you your country doesn't exist.
After many tries I found the trick: don't pick the name of your country from the auto complete. Fill in the abbreviation like NL. It does accept that. Full force dark patterns... #Meta #Instagram
I was trying to look into a minor issue with my mother's wifi router, but not remembering the password I attempted to log in a bit too much. When it stopped connecting to the internet at all I had apparently broken it completely and I tried to fix it for quite a while. Two resets and reconfiguring later we had finally internet back. Then we read on that internet that there had been a big outage with several service providers where their routes to Google had been broken, many people reporting problems.
So the conclusion is clear: Google's routes run through my mother's wifi router.
This weekend I built a prototype of using FedCM for IndieAuth! This gets rid of the need to enter your domain when logging in to websites using IndieAuth! Demo video and notes here: aaronparecki.com/2024/05/12/3/…
This weekend I built a prototype of using FedCM for IndieAuth! This gets rid of the need to enter your domain when logging in to websites using IndieAuth! Demo video and notes here: aaronparecki.com/2024/05/12/3/…
IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf took place this weekend, and I was inspired to work on a quick hack for demo day to show off a new feature I've been working on for IndieAuth.
Since I do actually use my website to log in to different websites on a regular basis, I am often presented with the login screen asking for my domain name, which is admittedly an annoying part of the process. I don't even like having to enter my email address when I log in to a site, and entering my domain isn't any better. So instead, I'd like to get rid of this prompt, and let the browser handle it for you! Here's a quick video of logging in to a website using my domain with the new browser API:
So how does this work?
For the last couple of years, there has been an ongoing effort at the Federated Identity Community Group at the W3C to build a new API in browsers that can sit in the middle of login flows. It's primarily being driven by Google for their use case of letting websites show a Google login popup dialog without needing 3rd party cookies and doing so in a privacy-preserving way. There's a lot to unpack here, more than I want to go into in this blog post. You can check out Tim Cappalli's slides from the OAuth Security Workshop for a good explainer on the background and how it works.
However, there are a few experimental features that are being considered for the API to accommodate use cases beyond the "Sign in with Google" case. The one that's particularly interesting to the IndieAuth use case is the IdP Registration API. This API allows any website to register itself as an identity provider that can appear in the account chooser popup, so that a relying party website doesn't have to list out all the IdPs it supports, it can just say it supports "any" IdP. This maps to how IndieAuth is already used today, where a website can accept any user's IndieAuth server without any prior relationship with the user. For more background, check out my previous blog post "OAuth for the Open Web".
So now, with the IdP Registration API in FedCM, your website can tell your browser that it is an IdP, then when a website wants to log you in, it asks your browser to prompt you. You choose your account from the list, the negotiation happens behind the scenes, and you're logged in! One of the nice things about combining FedCM with IndieAuth is it lends itself nicely to running the FedCM IdP as a separate service from your actual website. I could run an IndieAuth IdP service that you could sign up for and link your website to. Since your identity is your website, your website would be the thing ultimately sent to the relying party that you're signing in to, even though it was brokered through the IdP service. Ultimately this means much faster adoption is possible, since all it takes to turn your website into a FedCM-supported site is adding a single <link> tag to your home page.
So if this sounds interesting to you, leave a comment below! The IdP registration API is currently an early experiment, and Google needs to see actual interest in it in order to keep it around! In particular, they are looking for Relying Parties who would be interested in actually using this to log users in. I am planning on launching this on webmention.io as an experiment. If you have a website where users can sign in with IndieAuth, feel free to get in touch and I'd be happy to help you set up FedCM support as well!
TL;DR there is a significant amount of context at the start of this issue before we get to the proposal, here is a google doc version for an alternative form. Background The origins of many federat...
Gidi Kroon
in reply to Archaeo-Histories • •@Archaeo-Histories I remember from a documentary I once saw about this site (with caveats for a faulty memory) that at a time when people were mostly nomadic, only two (known) places existed in Britain where people lived permanently: near Stonehenge(*) and in Skara Brae and other people may have travelled north and south between them.
What I thought was the most interesting detail is that when you enter one of these stone houses, the wall opposite the door has shelves inset in the stone wall, clearly intended to show off prized possessions to visitors. We have not changed...
(*) edit: near where Stonehenge would later be built.
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