I have always considered the use of gels fanciful (just as I consider the use of lens filters fanciful with the exception of the UV filter and, possibly, a polarizer). But it has gradually sunk in — through listening to podcasts, reading up and, mainly, trying futilely to correct white balance on many indoor shots — why some gels are extremely useful, perhaps necessary.
First among these is CTO: "correct to orange" or, as some would have it, "color temperature orange".
When shooting indoors with regular incandescent (tungsten) lights lighting the interior — well, they have been regular so far, but they have now been outlawed — and the strobe lighting the subject, you want to gel the strobe (flash) with a CTO gel. It will make the white light coming out of the strobe orange. Consequently, everything in your shot — both your subject and the interior lit with the overhead lighting — will have an orange tint. You then correct white balance in Lightroom, Photoshop or what have you. Done.
The alternative would be to cover all incandescent lights with a CTB ("correct to blue") gel. Then their orange light (we may not realize it's orange, but the camera's sensor does) would turn white and the interior in the shot you take with a flash will lose the ugly yellowish tint that you always struggle with in white balance correction ("If I correct the wall to white, how come the face turns blue?")
The problem with this latter approach is that you will have a considerably larger gel, perhaps several, a stepladder and a bunch of tape or clams to secure gels to every lightbulb in the room.
While with the CTO gel, you only need one, it's small, and it may even come with a handy holder that affixes it to the flash.
(I actually learned this over a year ago, but never finished the draft of this post.)
Friday, March 18, 2011
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Fly-tipping is British for dumping waste illegally
According to Wikipedia
And how did I find out about fly-tipping? There is a website FixMyStreet, which invites you to
It was mentioned in a weekly Community Update for the OpenStreetMap project. And if you don't know about, or participate in, the OpenStreetMap phenomenon, then you are seriously missing out on the major crowdsourced, worldwide, volunteer cartography movement of our times.
While the UK-only FixMyStreet uses some klutzy map watermarked "Ministry of JUSTICE", the announcement deals more specifically with the newly inaugurated Norwegian version called, naturally, FiksGataMi. And that one uses the beautifully rendered OpenStreetMap.
The idea behind both FixMyStreet and OpenStreetMap is exactly the same: directing the energy of civic-minded individuals towards improve the surrounding world for everyone. OpenStreetMap does it virtually, by letting anyone detail or correct the map of the area they live in or are well familiar with. FixMyStreet aims to do it quite literally: by allowing citizens to drop little local "bug reports" onto the map, which are immediately routed to the appropriate municipal authorities.
Here's a representative list of what bugs the Brits who visited the site in the last few hours:
The term is derived from the verb tip, meaning "to throw out of a vehicle" and on the fly, meaning "on the wing" — to throw away carelessly or casually.Too bad, because I had it figured out as "leaving garbage as tips for flies".
And how did I find out about fly-tipping? There is a website FixMyStreet, which invites you to
Report, view, or discuss local problemsAnd how, again, how did I stumble upon that whistle-blowing (or else tattletale) site? Glad you asked.
(like graffiti, fly tipping, broken paving slabs, or street lighting)
It was mentioned in a weekly Community Update for the OpenStreetMap project. And if you don't know about, or participate in, the OpenStreetMap phenomenon, then you are seriously missing out on the major crowdsourced, worldwide, volunteer cartography movement of our times.
While the UK-only FixMyStreet uses some klutzy map watermarked "Ministry of JUSTICE", the announcement deals more specifically with the newly inaugurated Norwegian version called, naturally, FiksGataMi. And that one uses the beautifully rendered OpenStreetMap.
The idea behind both FixMyStreet and OpenStreetMap is exactly the same: directing the energy of civic-minded individuals towards improve the surrounding world for everyone. OpenStreetMap does it virtually, by letting anyone detail or correct the map of the area they live in or are well familiar with. FixMyStreet aims to do it quite literally: by allowing citizens to drop little local "bug reports" onto the map, which are immediately routed to the appropriate municipal authorities.
Here's a representative list of what bugs the Brits who visited the site in the last few hours:
In all, over 100,000 problems have been reported in the UK since the site launched three years ago. 3,171 of them were fixed in the past 30 days.
Labels:
cartography,
crowdsourcing,
english,
language,
maps,
openstreetmaps,
osm,
society
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