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@theartofmadeline
Cosmic Funnies
Peter Solarz
art blog(derogatory)
Show & Tell
Sade Olutola
Acquired Stardust

roma★
Keni
Misplaced Lens Cap

Kiana Khansmith
occasionally subtle
ojovivo
cherry valley forever
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open

Andulka
Jules of Nature

oozey mess
hello vonnie
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

seen from United States

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@em-tumbles
Today’s date is 2²/3²/4².
YOU CAN ONLY REBLOG THIS TODAY
Be there and be square.
Hiatus
Hey buds, I'm taking myself off social media for the next few months so I have (even) fewer excuses to procrastinate on writing my dissertation. If you notice me posting less, that's why! See you all in the fall:)
Through previous romantic relationships, AJ learns what it means to be seen in their gender. But sometimes what it means to be a good or a bad partner isn’t so binary.
“And like Schrodinger’s cat, my gender identity morphed: just because someone was looking at it, not with derision, but with respect. And ok, hopefully a little lust.”
The moral of Rudolph the Red nose reindeer is that no one likes you unless you’re useful.
rudolph the red-nosed reindeer as capitalist propaganda: discuss
rudolph was already exactly as useful as the other reindeer. the moral is deviation from the norm will be punished unless it is exploitable
Massive Art Nouveau-Inspired Mural in Montreal
“For 16 days straight, from dawn to dusk, five highly determined Montreal-based artists (who make up the artist run collective A’shop) worked on a graffiti mural of a Mother Nature-esque Madonna or a modern-day version of “Our Lady of Grace.” Inspired by Czech Art Nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha, the crew created this breathtakingly beautiful five story mural using 500 cans of spray paint in over 50 different colors.” [ My Modern Metropolis ]
Photography Super Newb Primer
So I recently upgraded from a point-and-shoot to a DSLR camera and because I was a super beginner I took two photography classes at the local photographer-nerd camera store. It was very informative, I’ve practiced a lot, and I’m confident that I have a decent grasp of the basics now. So because I totally have a thing for sharing interesting and/or useful knowledge, I am going to share this knowledge. So if you’ve ever been confuzzled by those photography buzzwords (I know I was), here you go.
First things first.
1. What’s a DSLR?
A DSLR is a digital single-lens reflex camera. There are lots of kinds of cameras but the two that 99% of non-professional photographers use are point-and-shoot (PNS) cameras and DSLRs. PNS cameras do not have interchangeable lenses, use electronics to view the subject before taking a photo, and everything is pre-programmed. Due to the advent and pretty darn good picture taking capabilities of cellphones, a lot of PNS cameras are now coming out with some level of manual control (I had one before I got my DSLR and it was pretty great).
A DSLR has interchangeable lenses for more control of the imaging. A mirror system lets you directly view the thing you’re shooting through the viewfinder, and there’s no shutter lag like there is with a point-and-shoot. Plus the ability to adjust aperture (more on that later) lets you control depth of field, and being able to shoot with shallow depth of field is like the number one thing that makes a photograph look like a more professional photo versus a casual snapshot.
Example:
(borrowed the image from auntpeaches.com)
The ability to isolate the subject from the background and get that cool blurred-out background is a function of aperture, and that’s something a point-and-shoot can’t do. Basically you have a shit-ton more control, much higher image quality and flexibility with a DSLR. But it takes some practice to learn to use it, although almost all DSLR cameras have an automatic mode that’ll do just fine for most situations.
DSLRs are a lot bigger and bulkier. You can’t put it in your pocket. And they’ll run you probably at least $700-900 bucks for a body, and then you need a lens for it (although many camera bodies are sold with what’s called a kit lens, i.e. a starter lens to get you going).
Size comparison (and that DSLR has a pretty small lens on it, mine is about twice that long):
There are many brands of point-and-shoots, but in the DSLR world, like 95% of photographers shoot either a Canon or a Nikon. And you kind of have to pick one and stick with it, because the lenses are not interchangeable. You have to buy Canon lenses for a Canon, etc. There are other less common brands but if you shoot a Nikon or a Canon you will be able to find equipment (lenses, batteries, etc) in any camera store.
Moving on.
There are two basic things you gotta worry about when you’re taking a picture: light and motion. Mostly light. Like, 90% light and 10% motion. And only motion if the thing you’re photographing is, you know, moving.
Taking a picture is recording the light that’s bouncing off the thing you’re photographing. So photography is really about light.
There are three major variables that you can control to affect the lighting of your shot.
1. ISO
People talk about this one first usually, because it’s the one that doesn’t actually affect how much light hits your sensor. ISO is a measure of your camera’s sensitivity to light. The lowest ISO setting (on mine it’s 100) is the “native” ISO. That’s the baseline light sensitivity. When you increase it, you’re turning up the volume on the sensor. You’re not getting any more light to the sensor, you’re just making the sensor more responsive to the light that hits it. The downside is that you are also turning up the noise. A high-ISO shot will have more noise. I would use my lowest ISO setting on a bright, sunny day. If I were shooting outdoors on my highest ISO setting (which is 1600, although more modern cameras have ISOs that go much higher) the image would be totally blown out and white. Most people adjust the ISO first according to the environment (sunny, cloudy, indoors but well-lit, dark, etc).
2. Aperture
You’ve probably heard on TV or somewhere some photographer drop jargon about “f-stops,” right? They’re talking about the aperture. This is how much the aperture will close down when you take a shot. A low f-stop means a very open aperture (counterintuitive, yes) and a high f-stop means a very narrow aperture. Illustration below of the size of the aperture at the moment you take the photo:
The size of the aperture is one of the two things that control how much light enters the camera (the other is shutter speed, more on that in a sec). A higher aperture value is a smaller opening, meaning less light will enter.
The other thing this affects is your depth of field. This is a big thing. Your camera will focus on the thing you’re pointing it at, right? You can imagine that distance, from the lens to the subject, as a slice of space where the camera can focus. Depth of field is just what it says…how thick is that slice of space where the camera can focus.
(image from bigsunphotography.com)
A shallow depth of field means your focus will only be good for a narrow slice behind and in front of your focal point. Everything else will be blurred out. If you stop down a lot (narrow the aperture), your depth of field increases until at the top of your range, you’ll be able to get clear focus on just about everything you see. So you’d use a shallow depth of field for a close-up portrait shot, and a deep field for a landscape shot.
(image from digitalphotographylive.com)
3. Shutter Speed
This one’s easy to understand. Shutter speed is how fast the shutter opens and closes. This is a factor if you’re shooting something moving fast, like a sporting event or fireworks or something. Not so much if you’re shooting a mountain. But the thing to remember is that the longer the shutter is open, the more light hits the sensor. Too fast a shutter speed for conditions could give you a dark image, especially if you are using a narrow aperture. Motion blur usually starts becoming an issue at 1/200s.
There’s other stuff like lens compression (which is something that happens when you zoom in and change your distance to the subject) and white balance, but this is the super newb edition.
4. The Settings
How much you can control these things depends on the capabilities of both your camera body and your lens. My camera body has ISO from 100-1600. My lens is a 17-85mm f/4-5.6 lens. The 17-85mm refers to the zoom capability - it can zoom out to 17mm (that’s a measure of the width of the field of vision - for reference, your eyes have about a 50mm field of vision, so at 50mm your view through the viewfinder will look about the same as what you see with your eyes) and zoom in to 85 mm. That’s a bit better than a standard kit lens. The f/4-5.6 means that my lowest possible aperture is f/4.0 at 17mm and f/5.6 at 85mm. That’s…okay. To get a wider aperture I’d need a different lens. And lenses that go down to very wide apertures, like f/1.5, are very expensive. I have great results with the lens I have. I took the picture below at f/5.6 (I was zoomed in, so that’s as wide an aperture as I had available).
Most DSLRs have three settings that are super useful - fully manual (meaning you must set the ISO, aperture and shutter speed), aperture priority (meaning you pick the aperture and the camera chooses the appropriate shutter speed) and time priority (vice versa - you pick the shutter speed and the camera chooses the appropriate aperture). You’d already have set the ISO value based on the light conditions. I like shooting in aperture priority a lot.
When you want to FANCY THINGS, that’s when it gets fun. For example. Consider this waterfall:
This was shot on f/9 and 1/640s. You can see there’s a tiny bit of blurring of the water. If I’d gone faster to freeze the water, it would be pretty dim.
But actually, I don’t want to freeze the water. I WANT it to blur. I love taking those cool waterfall photos where the water is all soft-looking. LIKE SO.
You can see that the lighting is roughly the same - the top one’s a little brighter, but not much, but in the second one, the water is blurred. So how did I do that?
To get this effect, you have to use a slow shutter speed, so that the waterfall’s motion blurs (you usually also have to use a tripod or other stabilizer - I used a handy post to brace my hand). But a slow shutter speed on a sunny day would let WAY too much light into the photo. It’s hard to take photos like this in brightly lit conditions, because any shutter speed slow enough to blur the water lets in way too much light, even at a tight aperture. I got away with this because the sun was setting and it wasn’t blasting directly on the waterfall.
So the first thing I did was decrease the ISO to 100, as far down as it goes. I wanted the sensor at its absolute minimum light sensitivity. Then I stopped down to f/22, a very small aperture. That will let much less light through than f/9. And I switched to total manual control, and I shot a series of photos, decreasing the shutter speed each time. This one is my favorite, this was at 1/4s shutter speed. Faster speeds didn’t get enough blur, slower ones were too light.
Okay! I hope this is helpful! I am learning more about taking photos all the time. Since I like to hike and travel, I decided it was a skill that would be worth pursuing.
“I found him in the trash can this morning”
How the fuck did they become so cool with each other so quickly lmaooo, that Raccoon looks like it loves him.
Dr. Dolittle level 100
Lol and he’s so unapologetic abt it
@why-animals-do-the-thing I feel like having a wild raccoon that close to your face could be an issue…
Yeah, this is a really bad idea. It’s unusual for wild animals to be that docile, so either the animal was hand-raised (unlikely to just find) or the animal is sick. That’s a good rule of thumb for most wildlife - if it’s docile enough to let you handle it and cuddle it, it’s probably sick enough that you should put it down right now and take a shower.
I’m not going to call this rabies because there’s nothing to go on, but rabies is a very good reason to not put raccoons close to your face. Nasty teeth and a hard bite and serious fur stank aside, holes in your face + killing the animal for a rabies test + probably rabies shots are really, really not worth it.
Actually the behaviour is in itself a sign of rabies. Rabies had two presentations in animals- “calm” rabies where they lose their fear of people and act domesticated and “rage” rabies which is the classic, foaming at the mouth biting things stereotype. This raccoon is behaving in a manner consistent with calm rabies. You do NOT have to be bitten to get rabies. ANY saliva contact with broken skin (even a scratch) is able to potentially transmit the rabies virus. If you think you may have been exposed to rabies, if you have the animal the head can be sent for testing. If not treatment must be started asap. Once you are symptomatic there is very little hope of survival. Only a handful of people have survived symptomatic rabies with the technique invented with the one girl of using a ketamine induced coma to buy her body time to produce its own antibodies. The majority do not survive. Those that do have severe brain damage and effectively have to relearn how to walk, talk, etc again. It’s not something to mess around with.
Besides the risk of rabies, raccoons also carry all sorts of parasites. Raccoon round worm is transmitted in their feces. Though not typically too harmful to raccoons, raccoon round worm can be fatal to humans.
That is two potentially fatal reasons you should never ever handle a wild raccoon unless you know what you are doing and are a trained professional. Less fatal but ick reasons- they also tend to have even more parasites- raccoons can have fleas, tape worms, and muscle parasites as well. They are walking balls of parasites because they eat everything. This is coming from someone who loves raccoons- they are gross animals and you absolutely never want them near your face like this.
This is really important. There’s very little awareness of the calm manifestation of rabies (like, I just had to look it up) and it’s much more likely to result in dangerous exposure considering the Internet’s current infatuation with cuddling cute wildlife. If an animal isn’t behaving normally at all, in any way, leave it alone.
While we’re on the subject of honeybees, I was recently visited by a swarm!
I came home Tuesday to find a huge cloud of bees all around a magnolia tree by the garage. In less than an hour, they coalesced into a tight ball of bees about the size of a football.
Now, I knew from a lifetime of nature documentaries that honeybees are at their most docile and least likely to sting when they’re swarming. A this time, they are stuffed silly with honey, don’t have any young to protect, and can simply fly away to avoid predators. They’re cruising around with their queen, looking for a new place to build a hive.
I wasn’t worried about them hurting anybody, but I didn’t necessarily want them to take up residence in my garage or attic. So I did what anybody would have done in this situation. I made a Facebook post about it and then googled what to do.
Fortunately, a friend of mine works at the Stratford Ecological Center in Delaware, Ohio. She put me in touch with their Apiarist (beekeeper), who was simply ecstatic to hear that I had a stray swarm and that I hadn’t poisoned it (apparently, lots of people don’t know the difference between honeybees and wasps/hornets/yellowjackets/etc). We set up a time for him to come rescue the swarm, and he even called a couple of students up to share the experience. One of them had been waiting for over two years to go on a swarm rescue run.
He brought out a hive box with some already-combed frames. We cut down the twig the bees had clustered on and dropped it into the box, and they immediately began claiming it as their home. Detecting the wax comb on the frames and recognizing a good hive location, the bees started to emit a lemony “homing” pheromone, letting all of their sisters know to settle down here and start laying down wax.
We kept the hive box overnight to allow errant scouts time to return. He came back the next morning to pick up the hive and take it to a quarantine site, until he could be sure of the bees health and temperament. He even left us a little parting gift from the apiary at Stratford. Everybody kept saying what an absolute treat it was to find and save a swarm, and how rare it was to see them. Provided the hive is healthy, in a month or two, I could go up to the ecological center and visit my bees!
With 40% of honeybee colonies in the US dying in the last year, every bee that can be saved is a small victory. It was a real privilege to witness this event and have a hand in finding a good home for the swarm.
If you see some swarming honeybees in the wild, call a beekeeper! They’ll be grateful to hear from you, and you’ll be doing some good for our pollinator friends!
i just had a heart attack
smol cloud puff
Why vegans should use honey instead of agave nectar
Okay, so I might get a lot of hate for this, I might not. I don’t particularly care either way, as long as word gets out about this, because it’s extremely important to me.
As I’m sure most people know by now, bees are disappearing at alarming rates. Simply put, our entire species could not survive without them. This is due to a syndrome called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).
Many vegans opt to use agave nectar instead of honey, because agave nectar is plant based. But harvesting of agave nectar is threatening the existence of two other endangered species: Mexican long-nosed bats (who live strictly off of nectars - primarily agave nectar) and the Jaguarundi (a solitary feline who basically looks like a love child between a jungle cat and a ferret.) Approximately 113,126 acres of these animals’ habitat were destroyed from 1991 to 2000, and more has been destroyed since.
On the other hand, beekeepers are essential to increasing bee populations. They monitor the bees’ health and help protect them from dangerous parasites and pesticides that are suspected to cause CCD. In addition, well-kept bees never need to use the amount of honey they produce; Honey is made by the bees to consume only when there is not enough food for them outside the hive. In the care of a good beekeeper, this will only happen during the winter months, and the keeper will leave enough honey for the bees to thrive until it’s spring again.
It’s best to buy local, organic honey if at all possible. Local beekeepers will not use dangerous factory-farming methods, and it helps maintain your local bee population! If you want to help bees in a more active way than buying local honey, you can plant a bee garden or even become a small-scale beekeeper! (I don’t have a link for this, it’s best to check out local resources. Maybe even ask the person selling honey at your farmer’s market!)
This is great info that I never knew about!!
@thee-beee-hivee !
“Took the kid for a walk. This is not our cat.”
Photos/caption by ©Lindsay Marsh
Happy condolences on the new cat.
He/she is your cat now.
“Happy condolences” is the best thing.
I was talking with @indeeddistract and he mentioned the need for a model of talking about consent and rape that follows the way we talk about, for example, drunk driving. Drunk driving is always illegal even if no one actually gets hurt because when you drive drunk you are putting other people at risk of bodily harm, chances are more likely than not that someone will get hurt, and if no one does it’s not because you made good choices, it’s because you rolled the dice and got lucky, which is obviously like, a bad way of approaching public safety.
The way we talk about rape and sexual assault and abuse etc is so contingent on, like… how victims perform trauma, that victims who are traumatized are often deemed as not being traumatized ENOUGH for their abuse to warrant justice, and people who were subjected to abusive behavior but ultimately don’t experience long-term trauma from it are written off entirely. The entire way we handle cases of abuse and rape both individually and on a systemic level hinges on the idea of “how much trauma does the victim experience”. What do we do when, for example, a grown man sleeps with a drunk 15 year old, but the 15 year old subsequently says she felt fine about it? By and large as a society we opt to let the guy off the hook, at the very least in the court of public opinion, particularly if they’re white - I mean like, this is what happened with David Bowie - because “well, no one got hurt”. But just because no one got hurt (or no one admits to getting hurt) doesn’t mean that that behavior is safe and unpredatory and that there shouldn’t be consequences for it - because what happens to the next drunk 15 year old girl, you know? A person with a history of drunk driving is realistically AT SOME POINT going to injure someone if their behavior isn’t checked. A person engaging in predatory and unsafe behavior in relationships and w/r/t sex is probably gonna traumatize someone unless they’re held accountable, and if they don’t it’s not because they did the right thing, it’s because they got lucky.
I APPROVE OF THIS LEVEL OF NERDY ANARCHISM
@willylordofnothing
ok that’s pretty cool
Anarchist geometry test. No gods, no rulers.
This made me groan out loud, but in, like, an impressed way.
Today I shut my cat in the fridge.
Okay, so here’s the deal. Tali loves the fridge. I don’t know why, but every single time we open it, she bolts for it and jumps in. She crawls into the back of the fridge and nestles int the smallest little corner she can. Now naturally, my biggest fear has been that I’ll close the fridge without knowing she’s in there. And of course, today I went to go grab my Brita filter to pour myself some water. I wasn’t really watching the fridge, and I just opened and closed it really quickly to put the Brita back while I was looking somewhere else. And then I looked around and realized that Tali had been in the kitchen, and now she was nowhere in sight. So immediately, I throw open the fridge door, and there is is, hanging out in the back, content as can be.
Fridge cat just got weirder. Today Tali got into the bathroom while I was showering, which of course made me a little nervous. I didn’t want her to freak out and hurt herself or go on a scratching spree. But evidently she loves water, so she jumped in and just splashed around for a while and got back out. But then she kept whining to get back in, so my boyfriend put a cooler down so she could get in and out with ease, which she took great advantage of. She’s soaking wet now, and very content.
I told Tali she was famous. She and her stuffed husky celebrated.
This is the kind of content I joined for
do you know a male celebrity with hair like this
this is the kind of hair i want to have again (it’s a really old photo)
but i’m currently in transition, so i have to play the “i’m a trans man” act for my gatekeepers. (i’m not a trans man, i’m very nonbinary.) so if i want hair like that it would help a lot if i had a photo of some male celebrity or something with hair like that which i could show them.. like, to justify that i’m not “female” because i have hair like that :/
so if you could help me out here that would be awesome
I google image searched medium hair length men and got a lot of results that are messier, curlier versions of this hairstyle, so I think it's definitely arguably a "men's" style or whatever. I'm really bad with knowing celebrities though, so I can't give you specific examples.
If you can style it differently at different times, I have my hair cut short on the sides but long on the top/centre so I can wear it down like this or pull it up into a "man bun" when I'm dealing with gatekeepers.
Colleges are ranked on how good their applicants are, not on how good their graduates are.
Or on how much people improve/get out of the experience, which honestly might be hard to calculate but would be the most interesting stat imho.