aerius

Auto seems to work better, though I have to admit my use of the scene selection modes was very limited. I spent most of my time in the full auto or full manual modes, plus I only had the camera for a day since it wasn't mine. The Fuji GA645 series is your friend, goes for around $600 or so on ebay and very easy to use. If you like it and think you'll be doing more medium format work you can then step up to Fuji's 690 series rangefinders which gives you a frame that's twice as large as the 645. The only problem is you'll need a light meter unless you happen to score a 100mm auto-electro lens for the camera.

E-PL1. The problem with the NEX series cameras is the goddamn retarded menu system, if you ever want to use it in anything other than the full auto mode it'll drive you to tears. If you're 100% sure that you'll never want to diddle with manual settings then the NEX series cameras work great, but if need to adjust the colour balance or ISO, have fun finding them and digging through several layers of menus.

I haven't heard the Exemplars yet, but I can't say I'm all that surprised. I've heard a DIY system based on Azurahorns with a ribbon tweeter and large bass cabinet which absolutely murdered the Avantgarde Duo Primo system.

The 2nd picture is what I think of as the classic Kodachrome look, the 1st & 3rd are more contrasty & saturated than what I'd expect from that film. I don't recall Kodachrome having such intense greens, it's a bit of a surprise to me. I've been saving my Kodachrome for fall colour shoots, but since the greens are that good I might as well break out a roll this summer.

Fishy. An amp which allegedly runs in class A but doesn't even get warm, yeah. Either it's a very low powered amp or it's not class A.

Check out PMC. Like the TDLs they're transmission line speakers and they're from the same family of sound as the Harbeths. I've only heard the lower to mid-level products from Harbeth and PMC so I don't know how their big speakers sound like.

Depends on what I'm going for, sometimes I'll use it to tone down distracting stuff around the edge of a frame if cropping it out messes up the framing, sometimes I'll use it to put a bit more emphasis on the subject, sometimes I'll do it just cause it looks better to me for whatever reason, and other times I won't use it at all. I usually keep it fairly subtle though, just enough to get effect without having it become obvious.

When in doubt go Canadian, in this case Sarah Harmer. I'm a Mountain is a sweet folk/bluegrass album, originals, covers, uptempo and relaxed, it's got it all.

Grab some Warren Zevon, start with the 2 CD "I'll Sleep when I'm Dead" compilation, if that's to your taste then grab "The Envoy" and fill in the gaps from there. IMO his songs definitely fit the silly lyrics but damn freakin' good criteria. The Tea Party are one of my fave bands, their Edges of Twilight album's always on my playlist. It's got a bit of everything, there's blues based songs, Doors & Zeppelin middle eastern inspired songs, and a nice instrumental. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_y9kSt-4g0, there's quite a few of their songs all over youtube.

A few photos from the Toronto air show last year

I'd agree that the GS1000 is a wtf choice for sound engineer work, but I'd have to say that a PS1000 is a perfectly viable choice as a 2nd headphone to go with a Senn 600/650 or Grado HP-2. For example, the PS1000 would catch a lot of glitches in the treble which get smoothed over by the Senns, and as a check against the HP's it helps make sure that you haven't mixed the mid-bass too fat or too thin.

Nice shots! I think it's definitely worth spending some time in Photoshop to clean them up a bit, fix the colours & brightness and really make things pop. This is what I generally aim for in my airplane photos, this one's from the Toronto air show last year. I try to get the colours as bright and saturated as I can.

Did you go nuts with the sharpening settings on the 1st picture? There's a pretty obvious halo around the Empire State Building as well as the top of the trees.

They're fairly similar for the most part unless you're going with Pan F Plus or Tri-X. Those 2 have a signature look to them which isn't found in the other films from either company, but with the rest of them, processing will make a bigger difference than the films themselves. Kodak's T-Max films have a slightly finer grain & better resolution than their Ilford Delta series counterparts, but chances are you'll never notice the difference unless you're using a tripod for everything and have the best lenses money can buy.

Same thing here, I'm lazy with my kitchen knives. All my knives are stainless except for a cleaver since that one takes a ton of abuse. It gets hacked through bone and half frozen meat all the time so toughness is more important than anything else.

Damnit. So either that douchebag Carcillo gets a Cup ring or Hossa gets one. Maybe a meteor can hit the Wachovia center during one of the games so that no one wins the cup this year.

Unfortunately it does. However, if you're obssessive enough about cleaning & drying the knives and you're not cutting lemons or something like that, you can get away with a carbon steel knife for kitchen use. It'll develop a patina over time though.

My guess is the chipping happened on impact with the cutting board, or maybe the person was cutting bread on a ceramic plate. With regards to stainless steels, if they were hardened to the same hardness as a carbon steel blade, the stainless blade would be far more brittle. Go the the Crucible Steel site and pull up the spec sheets for S30V which is about as tough as stainless gets and M2 or M4 tool steel, then look at the Charpy numbers. Even at a higher hardness, the tool steels remain tougher. It's possible to harden some stainless steels all the way to 64 HRC, but then the damn thing would be as brittle as glass and it'll chip if you look at it wrong. This is why stainless steels top out at 60-61, though some will push it to 62 which allows crisper edges but at the expense of toughness. With a non-stainless steel the hardness can be pushed all the way up to the 64-65 range while still having better toughness and resistance to chipping than a stainless at 61. This means much thinner & sharper high performance edges are possible with non-stainless steels without worrying about chipping.

Hardness doesn't have much to do with chipping, chipping is related mostly to the toughness of the steel and how brittle it is. Generally speaking, harder steels tend to be more brittle and prone to chipping, while being more wear resistant and allowing shallower edge angles for better sharpness and cutting performance. VG-10 at a Rockwell C hardness of 62 is definitely pushing it a bit, the optimum is around 60-61 and above that it starts getting brittle. Personally speaking, I'd tend to shy away from stainless steels once I get above 60-61 on the Rockwell C scale. Above that hardness, stainless gets too brittle for my tastes and I'd want to go with the non-stainless carbon steels.

It's nice to know there are some things that never change; the Leafs not winning a cup and the Sharks choking it up in the playoffs.

Go custom, George Tichbourne specializes in kitchen knives of all varieties. I have his K3 vegetable knive and the K5 butcher knife and I'm quite happy with them. They're not the last word in ultra high performance knives but they're far more durable and forgiving of mistakes like accidentally hacking it into bone. Which isn't to say they can't cut, they can, and they do a pretty darn good job, I can easily fillet the corner off a sheet of notebook paper and slice clean curves through a sheet of cigarette paper with the K3. They easily outperform any of the German knives and it's only the high-end laminated carbon steel or VG-10 blades that can beat them.

Russian choral music was mentioned, so if you don't already have it get a copy of Russian Favourites by the Red Army Choir. Though it's not super dynamic, there's something undeniably fun about blasting Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries on a speaker system. Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite is also pretty fun, particularly "In the hall of the mountain king". Still trying to find a perfect version though, every one I've heard to date has something that's a little off. Moving over to more modern music, there's the opening of "Space Dog" by Tori Amos off the Under the Pink album, and also "Sun Going Down" by The Tea Party from the album Splendor Solis. And though it's not music, it's pretty darn fun. Danley Sound Labs has a few sound files on the bottom of this page which you can download and put on a CD. The fireworks one is pretty ridiculous and the Harley Davidson sound clip is also pretty good.

There's a Simaudio W-5 with your name on it on Audiogon. The other nice solidstate amp I can think of is the Gamut D200, but I'm not sure if you can find a used one in your price range. I've also never heard it on a lower efficiency set of speakers so I'm not sure how well it'll mate with your Harbeths, whereas the Simaudio will happily drive anything short of an Apogee Scintilla.

Shutterfly's not bad but you might want to disable their Vivid Pics setting for portraits, the default setting tends to make skintones too saturated & red. Take advantage of the free 50 pics they give you when you sign up, pick out a dozen or so photos which are representative of your shooting style and print'em up with your free sample allowance. My personal favourite is AdoramaPix since they have a much larger choice of papers, you can get matte, lustre, silk, glossy, and metallic papers, the metallic is awesome if you have a lot of bright bold colours in your photos. You can even get all the colour profiles off their site so you can preview & make sure that all the colours in the photos look the way they should.