Suck it, h8rs. How I took a non-sucky photo below the jump.
Chat about whatever.
Suggested topic: does escalating use of drones, cyberwarfare, targeted killings and surveillance make Obama worse than Bush? Keep it civil and I will give each of you a cookie*.
(*) It’s a tracking cookie.
Dappled late-day light in the woods is a real problem. You never have enough light to just point and click a good shot, and little chance of getting your subject in a position where he looks good or stands out from the background. If you can engineer that then bully for you, but I did not feel like taking the time. Instead I got the late-day sun through the leaves behind Max to create a sort of edge-lit outline around him and set the exposure in manual mode so that the shutter was at the GH2’s max sync speed (1/160 s), the ISO was low enough to have more or less zero noise (250) and then I dialed an aperture (6-ish) that underexposed the scene by about one and a half stops. Max and the foreground were lit with one strobe on a radio trigger in my left hand, after goofing around with the power settings until Max looked good (I worked that out by practicing on a tree). The strobe is an old Achiever 632LCD that you can get, or something like it, for about fifty bucks and the radio trigger cost $20 on eBay, so this is an example of how you can do (arguably) very nice stuff for not much money.
A couple of useful observations:
(1) Notice how much nicer it looks when I get the light source way off-axis. Max looks like a real thing in 3D space rather than a cardboard party prop.
(2) When photographing pets, kids and other short things, get the camera low and use the tilting LCD if you have one. This pic would have looked better if I had gotten even lower.
(3) I had a diffuser clipped on the strobe head. This cuts down how much light you can get to the subject, but it also helps a ton to spread out the light source as much as possible. A clip-on diffuser works much better than the little flip-out things that some strobes have, a softbox/umbrella is better than that and the my favorite portrait ever happened when I talked an aunt into holding a white bedsheet off to the side and I lit the whole thing.
(4) Having the sun provide edge light is a great way to get a two-light portrait using only one light. However, you have to do it at the end of the day or in the woods. Otherwise the ambient is too bright for you to use anything close to the camera’s sync speed, which is usually 1/200 second or slower. Some cameras such as my GH2 have an option called ‘high-speed sync’ that can get around that problem by letting you use much faster shutter speeds at the cost of some strobe power. For that reason I am thinking about buying a TTL cable and high speed sync-capable strobe to replace my poor, drowned FL-36R.
Cassidy
Yes. And quitting smoking sucks.
SFAW
What a pretty doggie! What breed is she? Pekingese? Chihuahua? Shih-Tzu? Poodle? I can never tell all those cute widdle doggies apart.
schrodinger's cat
@Cassidy: How many days has it been? Good luck!
Mino
I dunno, Max looks kinda spacey.
Cassidy–Indeed, it do.
peach flavored shampoo
Something about this post’s title rings a bell….
schrodinger's cat
The blog is going to the dogs. Release the
kracken. Tunchen.Gin & Tonic
Seems like Arthur Brisbane (and you recall how much we all love him) is out at the NYT, or at least no longer “public editor”.
Cassidy
@schrodinger’s cat: I finished my last pack last Thursday. I’m using the elctronic cigarettes to get through the cravings and my jaw hurts like hell from chewing gum. I had three over the weekend just because I wanted a “real” cigarette, so one a day. I’m going totally without smoking today and planning on weaning myself off the nicotine by the end of next week.
Gin & Tonic
@Cassidy: The cravings will go away. In about 20 years.
Cassidy
@Gin & Tonic: Yeah, kinda what I figured.
Dave
Apropos of nothing else mentioned here…but I would love to see the GOP Convention devolve into utter farce. With Romney’s Bain problem not going away (Bloomberg just pushed out an article with the takeaway that Romney privatized the gains and socialized the losses at Bain) and impacting him in polls and key battleground states…is there a better-than-zero chance some wing of the GOP tries to nominate someone else?
rlrr
@Dave:
Or some wing of the GOP forces Romney to go full wingnut for his VP choice.
maryQ
A wing nut, a progressive, and Barack Obama go out for a day trip to a mountain lake. They pack a picnic basket, and paddle a canoe out to a small island in the middle of the lake. As the sun starts to go down, they get back in the canoe and head home. Halfway across the lake, they notice that they forgot the picnic basket. The wing nut and the progressive both decide that Barack Obama should swim back to the island and get the basket, because he is President. So, Obama steps out on to the water, and begins to walk across the surface. On the way, he kills Bin Laden , passes the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, prevents a depression, overturns DADT, and passes the ACA. He picks up the basket, and starts walking across the water back to the boat. The wing nut says “I friggin hate that uppity a88hole. Look at him strutting across the water like he is Jesus! Can’t wait to see him lose the next election, if we don’t impeach him first!”. “I know, right?!”, says the progressive. “The guy can’t even swim!”
SFAW
@Gin & Tonic:
That’s only if you’re lucky. My father quit smoking right after the first Surgeon General’s report, even 30 years later he sometimes wanted one – but not very often, fortunately.
GOOD LUCK! It’s difficult to get through it, but it’ll be worth it.
Jewish Steel
Guardian:
Romney blamed his refusal to publish his full spread of tax returns on the wife of a 2004 presidential candidate. Who’s advising Mitt Romney on PR these days, Tom Cruise?
This is what Romney told Fox & Friends:
Two problems here. One is that Teresa Heinz-Kerry wasn’t running for president. The other is that she did.
drip, drip, drip…
SFAW
@maryQ:
You don’t have to, if you know where the rocks are.
Dave
@rlrr: That would work too. Just a really nice popcorn event where the biggest douchebags on the planet turn on each other like rabid wolves.
rda909
Nice photo! “worse than Bush”?!?! Massive carpet bombing for years in heavily populated areas literally killing hundreds of thousands of innocent mothers and children, thousands of U.S. lives, and costing over time into the Trillions and hardly anything to show for it except a quagmire with no end in sight.
President Obama fixes much of that, with the most obstructionist Congress EVER, within a few years, and basically eliminates, or greatly diminishes the terrorist group(s) that have caused so much death around the world over decades. You think the question of Obama possibly being worse than Bush is a worthy topic of discussion?!? Wow. Nice use of the FL-36R though…
the Conster
Sully’s giving David Brooks a sad today.
Sully’s replaced Palin’s fake pregnancy with Romney’s fake responsibility. The narrative, it is set.
Roger Moore
@the Conster:
I hope he shows the same bulldog tenacity in chasing down Romney’s story that he did for Palin’s. He’s still not convinced about Trig today.
Kevin
Tim F. (0r any reader who can help me), I’ve been trying to track down the post where John Cole left the Dark Side; and every phrase I come up with to Google doesn’t help…I’ve tried going back through the archives, and January 2006 is where I started. At that time, you posted even more often than John, so I figure you might know the month and year of John’s reformation so I can track down his public transformation. I realize this question has probably been asked a lot; I’d just like to compare the before and after reader comments.
I love Balloon Juice and the commenters, and yes, Max is absolutely gorgeous. I’ve never met a Doberman who wasn’t a sweetheart, and yes I don’t get out much.
Add me to the Canadian fans of the site. (Older sect, I’m 59).
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@the Conster: This is the point at which Sully’s obsessive tenacity will be actually useful, as opposed to just silly.
Oh, and MAXpuppeh, in a great shot.
KG
@Roger Moore: he’s been pretty much wall to wall “Romney ain’t telling the truth” since Thursday or Friday, even posting stuff over the weekend. not only is the narrative set, it’s going to get worse (for Romney) before it gets better (for anyone not named Romney).
Tim F.
@Kevin: There is no one post where it happened. If anything my first post (“Why Democrats Matter”) might have been the first definitive sign that something serious was changing in John’s head. Other than that you should look to John’s many posts about Terri Schiavo to see him realize in real time that his party had been taken over by the bugshits. By the end of abu Ghraib it was more or less done; after that his big steps, such as registering as independent or becoming a Democrat, were mostly formalities.
the Conster
@Kevin:
Terry Schiavo turned him – try looking through the March 2005 archives, or whenever that whole episode was.
JPL
@Kevin: Except for the Iraq war, John was never over the top. He was the type of republican that I now call a democrat.
Yutsano
MAXPUPPEH!!
@Cassidy: My dad quit smoking when I was 8. 31 years later he still admits every now and again he wants one. The craving itself probably never goes away. And believe it or not cold turkey has been found to be the most effective method. Either way good luck to you sir.
burnspbesq
I reject your suggested topic, and substitute my own.
It’s definitely not mainstream. It’s not even clear whether it’s jazz, classical, or whether it fits into any long-established category of music. But this is the best and most important record of 2012, so far.
http://hahnandhauschka.com/
Heliopause
How about, each man’s foreign policy is/was reprehensible on its own terms without reference to the other?
Spatula
Did someone make the assertion that it does?
See also: Red Herring
Cassidy
@Yutsano: I know. The problem isn’t the niocotine addiction. I can suck that up. Although, don’t get me wrong, I’m a full blown addict. My primary problem is that I enjoy smoking. I enjoy that 5-10 minutes of alone time I get outside. I enjoy the taste and smell of tobacco. That’s the hard part for me. I wouldn’t have had those few this weekend, but I really just wanted to go outside and smoke a cigarette. I could already go all day without one and control the craving.
Roger Moore
@JPL:
“I didn’t leave the party, the party left me!”
KG
so, I broke down and checked what Hewitt was saying, because, well, it’s always entertaining to see what he’s getting wrong (full disclosure, I know Hewitt from my time in law school, though I wasn’t in any of his classes, or as my classmates called it “show prep”).
Shockingly, the Bain thing is good news for Romney because it will shift the focus to Romney’s patriotic decision to save the Olympics and be a great American. And of course the whole “Romney may have committed perjury or is being less than honest about when/where/what he did for this company he owned and controlled” is just a “psuedo-scandal.” Instead, this is going to show how Romney saved the government from itself and that Obama is all about “smash-and-grab big guvmit politics” or something…
The spin is fast enough to separate particles.
Spatula
@Roger Moore:
Sullivan is a reactionary drama queen pig, but anyone who takes Palin’s Trig story at face value is a Gary Gullible.
Yutsano
@Cassidy: When I was a server at a restaurant I started smoking just so I could have a break. It was really the only way of getting one. After I went back to school I quit and never looked back. Smoking is also a social activity, plus it gets you that 5-10 minutes away from your desk.
jwb
Charlie Pierce has a righteous rant up over the FDA secret surveillance and firing of employees. I haven’t yet been been able to get a good fix on this story yet, but if I was a Republican looking for an administration scandal to change the news coverage, this seems like a good candidate. Except the part where it’s about science and stuff.
ETA: I loved this line: “Some slopes are not necessarily slippery, but some of them are luge runs, and this is one of them.”
Mino
@Cassidy: Heh. I still go outside several times a day and sit for 4-5 minutes. Pet the cat. Get up and go back inside. It’s a mental break.
JPL
@Roger Moore: I was the classic independent for decades both locally and nationally. Show me the issues. There is no way, I would ever vote for another republican.
Mino
@jwb: I saw that. FDA administrators were spying on employees for evidence of leaks to embarass the dept. Look for other depts to follow.
jwb
@Mino: So are you saying spying on employees is general policy throughout the administration?
I got that the FDA administrators were spying on employees for evidence of leaks. What’s not clear to me is exactly why the employees were leaking in the first place. The report said it had to do with something about safety of certain equipment, but I found the reports very murky as to who was covering up what for whom.
quannlace
Yeah, I love the new excuse for not releasing the tax returns is ’cause Mrs. Kerry didn’t.
Like somebody else said, ‘So now Romney’s running for First Lady?’
Roger Moore
@Spatula:
I don’t take her story at face value, but I don’t attach it to giant conspiracy theories, either. I think she’s bullshitting, blowing up a minor incident into a major one because she thinks it will make her look more like heroic mama grizzly. The stonewalling of requests for her medical records reflect an ordinary desire for medical privacy, an obsession with secrecy that she’s shown in other areas, and an unwillingness to give out information that will let her be called on her BS. Sullivan is looking for a grand conspiracy where there’s only ordinary venality.
Anya
I am not sure what to make of the events of the last few days. For the first time since I started paying attention to politics, every Dem is sticking to the same message (I am discounting Harold Ford and Ed Randall). No one is undermining the message and they’re all hammering the hell out of it. What the hell happened and how do we maintain this winning strategy?
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
Regarding your photo. You didn’t mention the most important part – how do you get Max to stand still while you’re setting f-stops and waving photo equipment all around?
Mino
@jwb: The article I saw involved unsafe x-ray exposures(like mammograms, airport, etc.) being dismissed by FDA admin.
I don’t know, but recently the WH has been testy over leaks.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
The President is rockin the house in Cincinnati, complete with unscheduled visit to the lobby to greet those who couldn’t get into the main ballroom where he’s speaking at the town hall. If only my schedule had cooperated.
Princess Leia
@rlrr: Can’t imagine he can choose Pawlenty or Portman. Too boring–he needs the shiny object. Bizarrely, why not do the crazy and choose Condi? At least everyone will change the subject from Bain— and he needs that more than the wingnuts. (and, yes, I know i am naive to think this could really happen.)
Just Some Fuckhead
That’s a really super picture. You have a gift.
PeakVT
@Anya: I think Mitt managed to push more buttons at one time than anyone else has in a while – lack of honesty, contempt for the rule of law, outsourcing/offshoring, cheating on taxes, using tax havens, vulture capitalism – and looked weak doing it. Democratic politicians aren’t the most courageous bunch, but they are at least willing to pile on when it’s safe.
the Conster
@Anya:
Everybody HATES Romney.
Tim F.
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: I did mention that – To get the settings right I practiced on a tree. Then I got ahold of the ball and told Max to sit for it. He will hold still for a minute or so if there is a ball or a treat in it for him. He can hold much longer on leash, of course, but left to his own devices he is not the world’s most patient doberman.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Princess Leia: the pro-lifers have vetoed Condi, and Rick Santorum is crazy enough to think if he takes out Romney he’s the front-runner for 2016. I keep waiting for him to weigh in on Bain, if he does, I think that will be some serious blood in the water.
rea
@Kevin: I’ve been trying to track down the post where John Cole left the Dark Side
This post at Crooked Timber, and John’s comments, is a good place to start looking.
Maude
@rea:
Link doesn’t work for me.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Tim F.: Ah. Good doggie. If I had held a ball in front of any of our dogs there would have been much leaping. Except for the dog(s) who would have taken off as soon as the leash was off.
Tim F.
@Maude: Link.
ETA: I fixed it in Rea’s comment as well.
Princess Leia
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I think you are right, but I wonder who can he choose that can seem interesting? Kay Bailey Hutchinson, maybe???
geg6
@Princess Leia:
You mean a “game changer”?
Yeah, that worked out well for McCain, didn’t it?
ETA: MAX PUPPEH! LOVE MAX PUPPEH!
Anya
@PeakVT: @the Conster: We’re lucky then that Romney is the Republican nominee.
“Difference extends to individual taxes. We don’t need a president that’s going to give himself a tax cut. We need a president that’s going to cut your taxes.” POTUS in Cincinnati
Read more: http://livewire.wlwt.com/Event/President_Obama_Visits_Cincinnati_2#ixzz20oMSp3Xc
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: and did anyone see any discussion of VP Condi that mentioned mushroom clouds or NSA memos? I didn’t. I swear, the Village has given itself complete amnesia about the Bush years. It’s like Lily Tomlin (I think) said, no matter how cynical you get, you can’t keep up.
Princess Leia
@geg6:Worked for a month or so…
Anya
The POTUS is going a great job in the Q & A session at the town-hall. He said that the Republicans classify Fortune 500 companies as small business.
Maude
@Tim F.:
Thank you. I hadn’t read this and I wanted to.
trollhattan
Holy crap, I just saw Sarah Silverman’s video message to Sheldon Adelson. Holy crap. Yes, a dog is involved, so I’m on-topic. (Apologies if this has slready been covered ad nauseum.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B5o6-qNk6Q
ding dong
@Kevin: kevin. Daily Kos had a front page post about John switching allegiances as did Atrios. You may want to look there
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
so, your methodology is to buy a bunch of shit, and diddle with it.
you’re like the post-modern unpecker.
nice pelt by the way.
Steeplejack
@burnspbesq:
Dude, give the people some easy-to-find music: “Krakow.”
Mini-documentary here.
RareSanity
@Kevin:
You’re question (and the subsequent discussion), caused me to perform a fun exercise. I used The Googles, to find the very first comment I posted at Balloon Juice. Coincidentally, it was also in a post by Tim F.
Hello April 19th, 2007!
I cannot believe, that for a few months of my life, I actually considered myself to be a libertarian. SMH
Sometimes it is just freaking embarrassing to look back on a past self. I evolved quite a bit…right along side Cole, the only difference being, I never, ever actually supported Republicans or GWB.
It is with much embarrassment that admit to being a Paultard for about six months back 2007. Sure am glad I outgrew that particular psychosis. By, the end of the summer 2007, that was all over.
ETA: Had anyone told me I would still be religiously following this site, a full 5 years later, I would have thought they needed their head examined. Life is a funny thing…
Steeplejack
@Kevin:
I see others have given you suggestions. Also check out “When Rhetoric Meets Reality,” from October 9, 2007. The occasion is the whole Graeme Frost countertops thing:
Although I believe the wheels started to come off during the Terri Schiavo circus in 2005.
Kevin
Thanks to everyone who responded to my question. You helped immensely. For what little it is worth, I’ve been a fan of the site and rare commenter since mid-2008 when I decided to check it out after seeing it linked on so many of the sites I was reading at the time. One last question and then I’ll shut up…when exactly did John adopt Lily? I read about his walking her adventures, and know about Rosie from start to now, but I seem to have missed the start of John’s love affair with Lily :)
Cris (without an H)
Better be shoe-shaped anyway.
Cris (without an H)
@Kevin: one more thing: Here is the post where John actually changed his voter registration, which ends with this cryptic line:
I’m not sure Tim ever actually explained.
danielx
Is Obama worse than Bush…oh boy. Well, he’s certainly more competent than Bush – not that Bush’s competency sets a very high bar, I know. Obama’s policies re: the Forever War on Terror or whatever are basically Bush’s on steroids but lacking the open gloating about torture, the yee-haw triumphalism, etc.
Obama’s policies on domestic security issues are if anything worse than Bush’s, because he made so many pre-election noises about doing away with the ongoing and endless assaults on the Bill of Rights. Instead…open warfare on whistleblowers, no rollback of the more egregious features of the Patriot Act, domestic use of drones, ever expanding TSA activity on the flimsiest of pretexts, etc etc etc.
The key to all this is that Obama is not, repeat not, going to get outflanked by the Republicans on national security issues, and if that takes some innocent people dying by flying killer robot or innocent Americans being harassed and/or arrested without cause or warrant by officious law enforcement agents, well, he’ll bear up under those burdens, law and Bill of Rights be damned. And yes, it’s a horrible and cynical calculation even when it’s supposedly necessary. It’s also put Obama in a position where it’s impossible to realistically discuss the “defense” (read war-making) budget, which has become more of a sacred cow than Social Security.
Domestically – it’s not like there’s all that much left of the Fourth Amendment (to name one) anyway – after twenty years of the Forever War on Drugs, the Supremes had already carved out so many exceptions that the Fourth has more holes than a piece of Swiss cheese, and the Patriot Act put paid to what was left. We’ve gone from being the land of the brave and home of the free to the land of the terrified and enraged and home of the spied upon, and let’s not forget that we imprison way more people as a percentage of population than any other country on earth. If you don’t like the thought of domestic drones now, wait ten years when it will be possible (theoretically anyway) for the govt to keep a virtually unlimited number of people under 24/7/365 watch in real time via minidrones…fun city.
;endrant
All that being said, Obama – warts and all – is better than Bush and still a better alternative than the Marquis, since Obama is competent and still interested in programs that make a real difference and improvement in average people’s lives. Romney isn’t, aside from his many other flaws – you know, being a lying sonofabitch, a Wall Street asshole, having neocons* crawling around his campaign…and so forth.
*The bastards are like zombies, they keep coming back to life and you can’t get rid of them.
Kevin
Whoops…Ignore my last question about when John got Lily. I googled it and found out on my first try. Once again, thanks to everyone for their help.
Tim F.
@Cris (without an H):
Hah. I had to rack my brain about that one. It all has to do with a devious plan that I hatched to subvert the 2007 weblog awards by getting people to nominate BJ in the conservative category. Since John was still registered independent and had been a pro-Iraq Republican who helped found RedState, the blog still had enough conservative cred to get away with it.
The plan would have caused near-total chaos in the rightwing blogosphere, for a couple of reasons.
(1) Rightwing blogs take the weblog awards very seriously, much more seriously than any leftwing blogs take awards for the most part. Every third-tier rightwing blog has a bunch of award bugs and other credentials lined up in its right sidebar like medals on a tinpot Colonel. The Webbies are the World Series for these guys.
(2) We could not fail to win. Every leftie blog would have lined up to get people to vote for us, whereas the reactionary right vote would be split nine ways.
(3) If and when we won the fallout would have been beautiful to watch. Heads exploding from Canada to Mexico, yes, but it would also have precipitated a desperately needed debate about what conservatism even means. I would have written a profound, heartfelt essay explaining how John represents true conservatism (in a way he does, or did) and how his former allies should feel ashamed to follow the piper of political convenience so far afield from it.
The Wizbangers found a loophole and outsmarted me. They named twelve conservative finalists that year instead of the usual ten. Then they ‘discovered’ that their tech could only work with ten finalists so they cut two finalists at the last minute: us and the Jawa Report.
They bumped BJ and Jawa to the ‘Best of the top 250 blogs’ category. We were way out of our league, having only qualified due to a temporary quirk in our traffic meter. I said what the hell and pushed people to vote anyway, they did, and we won. We even beat RedState that year. Their tears did taste pretty good, but we never got the glorious blogapocalypse that I was hoping for. John registering as a Democrat shut the door on that gambit for good.
Funny that I still feel kind of bad for the Jawa Report. They didn’t deserve to get kicked off but it would have looked too fishy to bump BJ alone after all the nomination votes we got.