Oleg Volk

Lessons from Armed America.

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First impressions:

• Very light
• Superb trigger
• Clear sights

Hyper Cav

I have no personal experience with these bullets but a few forums have brisk discussions going.

Lighten up and shoot

Compare with Fred Reed's experience with American Airlines.

Granted, the price of air fares has dropped, but the emphasis on friendly service now seems to be limited to Southwest Airlines.

This summer, I had the pleasure of eating out at Ji Bou Te cafe. Left to my own devices, I would not have picked Creole food, but I was with a friend and deferred to his choice. The food turned out to be wonderful. It had plenty of flavor but no mouth-burning hotness I feared. Even simple grits were a treat. Service was friendly and efficient, too.















I recommend it.

Larger images (mixed in with nsfw photos)

Here's the situation: I have a Windows XP64 computer with two 2TB Western Digital external drives. USB interface works fine, just very slowly. Firewire works fine, just slowly. eSATA works slowly ONLY on my new PC and keeps disconnecting. Since the drives were set up to run in IDE emulation mode, that requires a re-start and I lose data when the drive loses connection while reading or writing.

I am seriously frustrated. These two drives were supposed to be my backups but they are just about unusable for anything except storage. Trying to actually work from them fails. The reason I am so keen on figuring this out is that I will soon need external working drives, not just backup. I am not sure what the problem is, neither is the guy who built the computer for me.

Can anyone recommend a local (Nashville) expert to me?

Lawrence Kim has a photo blog with useful articles on lighting and interacting with people on photo shoots.

LX3 fulfills its intended niche as a pocketable sketchbook.

Interview with Vermeer.

The following images are purely to illustrate the image quality provided by LX3 when it is used for snapshots.
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• Flash synch at any shutter speed. Fill flash at f2.8 and 1/2000s outside -- no problem. Should work fine with radio flash triggers...though at that point might as well carry a real camera.
• Pretty good AF. Illuminator works as designed -- unlike the missing one of 5D2.
• It is tiny. 550EX flash put on top of it for a test is about three times as big as the camera.
• The movie mode is absolutely useless because focus is fixed at the moment filming begins.
• Though lacking eye-level viewfinder, it can be held steadily through the used of tensioned strap.
• The interface isn't the simplest nor the most complex. Fortunately, the buried menu items are for set-up only, while the most commonly used features have direct controls.
• Sensor noise is minimal at ISO 80 and acceptable at ISO 400.

I realized that the single most profitable image license I sold was for a picture made with a 1MP P&S camera (photo was taken in 1999 and licensed in 2009). So having some camera on me at all times ought to pay for itself. It's a direct analog of a P32 being used as a backup for a Glock 17 (Canon 5D2). I would have preferred Panasonic GF1 but for the lack of availability.

Fascinating film. It's a mix of documentary and propaganda, but really puts visuals in your mind. How do 5,000 dead Zanzibar Arabs look. How do 50 dead elephants look. What did a Kenyan farm look like before the British left. I very much recommend this film. It pulls no punches and really illustrates the saying "Africa wins again".

My images are up on Armed or Not?