KenElevenShadows

I attended an Eclipse Party at the local community college here in California. These are iPhone photos of the event.

Oh, one more thing.....your sunglasses are NOT dark enough to protect your eyes. That's right, even your super dark ones.

Just to be clear, you don't require a total eclipse to damage your eyes. There's a reason why all eclipse parties and events in California - which had somewhere around a 40-45% occlusion of the sun - issued solar glasses. It's for the same reason. There's less light, so your iris expands. The damage occurs because you are then letting in far more UV light, which in turn has far more capacity to damage your retina. And I know that for people who experienced this, they might think, "Well, it didn't really get any dimmer, so yeah, I'm good." It actually did get dimmer, but because it was a slow, gradual dimming and only 40-45%, our eyes simply adjusted, and we never noticed the dimming light. So can you still get your retinas fried by looking into a 40-45% solar eclipse? Yeah, absolutely. You might just need to stare at it a little longer. Whatever you do, you do NOT want to look at the eclipse through the optical viewfinder of your camera. That results in a near-instant fry.

Agreed. I wasn't even going to say anything, but it's really hard to refrain after someone says "haters always going to hate" as if anyone hates a particular company capriciously.

The sun is far more damaging when there is an eclipse than when there is not. There's less light, so your iris expands. The damage occurs because you are then letting in far more UV light, which in turn has far more capacity to damage your retina. That's not a hysterical "fear of God" statement. It's a statement of fact, and it's up to you to heed warnings from optometrists and eye specialists or not.

It almost seems like something that Ricoh/Pentax might do.

Some of us don't prefer to purchase products from companies that are found guilty of patent infringement in a court of law or refuse to give you a straight answer when you ask them if they use slave labor for their products. If that's known as "haters always gonna hate", then sure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The issue is with Photofocus, I think. I have to create 1600px photos for Photofocus because they're run by Wordpress, and that's the optimal size. 1600px looks great when it's on my computer, and it even looks pretty good when I upload it. However, when I use the comparison, it falls apart and looks really horrible. I just don't think I am going to do too many of the comparisons because it nullifies all that work I'm trying to do, which is to give readers as close to an apples-to-apples comparison as I can do. My photos already take a hit when they are displayed on Photofocus, but they seem to take another hit when rendered in the comparison.

Yes, I'm really dissatisfied with how difficult it is to see the general character of the images, even at 400% magnification. I thought for sure 400% would be obvious, but not even then.

Topaz Photo AI V2 vs. Lightroom Denoising Battle: RAW to RAW (One more try!) https://photofocus.com/photography/topaz-photo-ai-v2-vs-lightroom-denoising-battle-raw-to-raw-one-more-try/

Do you feel this is an apples-to-apples comparison between this and someone lip-syncing to a song while making you believe they are singing?

Gotta be careful what you say on forums criticizing Behringer now.

Sadly no, it's a bit far, and I have way too much going on. I look forward to seeing a few images from you people, though.

That IS some beautiful guitar playing.

I'm in Southern California. It's gorgeous today. We've gotten more rains in the past week, and we've had unusual weather patterns and some enormous rains this winter.

Huh? Pentax announces a new daguerreotype camera! https://photofocus.com/photography/huh-pentax-announces-a-new-daguerreotype-camera/

No, you do you. I get that each one satisfies a certain aspect.

I went to school with these guys, and saw them perform in the Student Union at Cal State Northridge, where they were completely unhinged, hilarious, funky, bizarre, and amazing.

"Love Hurts" by Nazareth fits the bill for me here. I heard that first, knew it was a cover. I later heard the Gram Parsons/Emmylou Harris version. Very different take, and I love that one as well. I don't want to say which one I like more, this or the Nazareth. Regardless, I love both much more than the Everly Brothers or Roy Orbison version.

Yeah, there's that....

Reducing noise of high-ISO Milky Way photo with Topaz Photo AI V2 How does the noise reduction work on the new Topaz Photo AI V2? We kicked the tires on its noise removal feature. https://photofocus.com/photography/reducing-noise-of-high-iso-milky-way-photo-with-topaz-photo-ai-v2/

That's pretty much what I was trying to get at with one of my last posts. I agree with this completely.

Those sorts of cameras already exist, I believe. https://kolarivision.com/product/uv-photography-ready-converted-camera-kit-canon-eos-rp/ We also have infrared cameras, which require a little bit of post-processing, but are really quite good. I have thought to get into this or UV photography in the past, but have never actually done it. Infrared usually requires modifying the camera although there are lens filters as well. Then there is the James Webb Telescope photography. The photography, especially the processing, is rather involved. This is not quite what you are discussing, but perhaps it deserves an explanation as well. "Infrared light is invisible to our eyes, so image processors translate these wavelengths of light, in order, to visible colors. Webb observes infrared light, light that is beyond what human eyes are capable of detecting. However, the process of applying color to Webb’s images is remarkably similar to the approach used with the Hubble Space Telescope and other astronomical observatories that observe visible light. Telescopes use advanced filters that can detect specific elements or molecules. This is also why telescope images are typically layered with two or more images from different filters. In addition to stretching, scaling, and cleaning up artifacts, STScI’s imaging specialists carefully assign individual images from Webb’s various filters to blue, green, and red color channels to align with the color palette human eyes perceive. All the colors we can see are composed of those colors and any digital image we view on a screen can also be broken down into red, green, and blue color channels. Color is applied chromatically: The shortest wavelengths are assigned blue, slightly longer wavelengths are assigned green, and the longest wavelengths are assigned red. If more than three images make up the final composite image, purple, teal, and orange may be assigned to additional filters that fall before or in between blue, green, and red. Assembling the color image from these images gives our imaging specialists the initial composite image. Yes, there is still work to be done! These initial color images are still only drafts."

Most insightful. I feel that this will indeed happen. And if it doesn't, well, you'll probably have your Nobel Laureate revoked. I wrote an article where I asked Gemini AI to predict what features cameras would have ten years from now that cameras don't have now. I think Gemini did rather well. You'll have to decide whether this is better than what Ray Kurzweil could have done. AI’s crystal ball: Predicting future camera features in 2034 https://photofocus.com/photography/ais-crystal-ball-predicting-future-camera-features-in-2034/ Let's meet back here in ten years and see how how accurate the predictions are!

You probably have seen this already, but Gallup has been creating a list of the world's happiest countries from several measurable factors. This is an NBC news article about the most recent list: