Both pictures have been taken on a walk today at the same place, just one horizontally, while the second a meter away straight up - with the new Panasonic 20mm on the Panasonic G2, yeah, early Christmas present! Great lens and lot's o'fun.
Anyway, both, sujets reminded me of this older simulation from some time ago:
(clicking on the image will show the full size simulation result)
A view on the Vierwaldstädtersee after an Off-Site event on Friday 2012-11-09 on the way down from Stoos. On the right bottom there would be Brunnen, top on the green area in the middle is Bürgenstock, and in the background is the Pilatus mountain.
Shutter speed set manually to 1/800th, measured the exposure before at the street and near by shadows of the building, plus manual focus + aperture, rest electronically/digitally done by Sony... (with Nikkor 55mm f/1.2 and Sony Nex 5).
The actual idea is that once the exposure is fixed and set up, you can pan around with the camera at will and still get a nice contrast in each picture and without any fluttering exposure changes getting in between the action.
A surprisingly sharp el cheapo lens I still had from the 80s (I can't remember a single photo I made with it back then), a used 2x tele converter that I got with a bunch of other manual focus lenses, and a Micro Four Third camera with a crop factor of 2 which all results in a 1° 10' picture angle or 40 times magnification compared to a normal lens.
However, it rested all on an extra Manfrotto 293 tripod collar/lens support on top of a new (for me) used old heavy stable nice comfortable:) Gitzo tripod head on the Manfrotto 0190xprob tripod.
This is the Nikkon flagship lens from the sixties! Nikon is famous for using the same mount from back then all through til today's DSLRs.
However, the sales person hesitated today to sell me a used Nikon D60 out of fear, it would destroy the electronic contacts inside the camera. Well, I trusted google, that it is one of only four models that can hold this lens without any modification (they are all low end models, as they don't have something that would collide with something in all the other models' hardware - don't ask me what).
So it worked, thought Nikon disabled the light metering functionality (for no reason but to discourage using old manual focus lenses or to sell more high end cameras - ironically it would work using a Canon DSLR with a Nikon adapter!).
So here is a picture with the Nikon lens, the Minolta 35-135mm zoom used for the three photos above, oh, this photo is made with aperture f/4 thought.
But the bigger problem is actually using the lens full open with aperture f/1.2 and getting the focus right. Actually it is difficult to see the final effect without any magnification before making a shot.
After using the FreeMind mind mapping software for many years, navigation had become sluggish with a single mega map keeping my ever growing notes... Looking for some tips how to best split up the data map or if other people have similar problems and maybe someone is working on making the software faster or smarter, found out one or two of the core developers forked the project and created Freeplane based on FreeMind.
Loading the 2010 stable version 1.1.3 (FreeMind 0.9 is from early 2011) the sluggishness just disappeared. Good job!
Only thing is I had to configure Freeplane under Preferences to always save the folding information!
BTW, nowadays I use this Mind Mapping tool 99.99 percent as a kind of knowledge base or How To list. It is very quick to navigate (now again ;-), and when copy pasting things into a Unix terminal each line gets copied with a line ending, so before something gets ironed out in a little program shell script I can just keep some commands in FreeMine/Freeplane for later copy and paste usage.
For ToDo lists however I use and need something with a calendar, not for planning when to do what (that never worked for me as things always take their own time and everything else has been just wishful thinking on my side), but to pop up when I have to be reminded to focus or start with something (or to push something back).
OK, here are the links in case Google's servers are down today:
Saw similar pictures taken with this legacy lens on Flickr on Micro Four Third cameras and liked them very much. Now got a nice examplar of it for myself:). On a Micro Four Third system this lens has an effective focal length of an equivalent 200-600mm lens on a 35mm camera.
Back when I was 14 and got into photography with a Minolta X-700, MD 50mm 1.7, MD 28mm 2.8, and some no name 70-210mm (Soligor? thought I also liked it), a Minolta MD 70-210mm was kind of a dream, did not even dare to think much about this one. However the 100-300mm is quite bulky and with 700 g and without a collar doesn't really hold very well on a tripod attached the comparatively small Panasonic G2. For nice weather walkabouts, so to speak.
[Update 2012-03-04: The winner gives a detailed run down of his thought process and algorithms. Available is also the source code (less then 2000 lines of code for the main strategy class.]
Following is a list of different interesting games you can replay online...
