Month: March 2013

By Darren Rowse, Digital Photography School – July 13, 2010 at 10:18AM

A Guest post by Amar Ramesh.

Antelope Canyons in page Arizona is one of the most exquisite gifts of nature that is generally overlooked by people traveling to Arizona.

The sandstone canyons lit from the streak of light passing right through the slots makes it one the most serene places in the world. Located at the Navajo Tribal Park near Lake Powell, these canyons have narrow paths, created by water flowing through them for millions of years. It’s a photographer’s paradise. Listed below are some the quick and easy tips that would help you take better pictures in these canyons.

1. Plan ahead

Like for any travel, do your homework and get to know the place. There are two canyons – Upper and Lower – both located in Page, AZ. Mid-day(11am-1pm) between the months of March and October is the best time to photograph these slots, with the shafts of light shining down from the openings above. There are photography tours available in both upper and lower canyons. Even though it’s a little expensive than the ordinary tour, it’s totally worth it. The guides who take you along the photography tour generally do a wonderful job helping you ‘chase’ the light. I highly recommend it.

2. Gear

Use the widest angle lens from your arsenal. You have to capture a wider area with light streaks and you absolutely need a wide angle lens to do this. If you don’t own one, try renting it. Tripod is a must and make sure you turn off image stabilization. A remote trigger would help remove the vibration caused by pressing the shutter button.

3. Try not to change lens

An important note to remember if you are shooting with a DSLR is that you should not change your lenses inside these canyons because of the amount of dust in the air. Trust me you wouldn’t want to change your lenses inside the canyons. If you have a second camera, by all means, take it along with a different lens on it. You will get a different perspective. And yes, carry a cloth to clean the lenses frequently.

4. Make use of your Live view

The canyons are generally crowded. People keep streaming in and out, in large groups. So expect people both in front and behind you. With so much going around its easy to be engrossed into the view finder. So advice would be try using the live view, as well as an articulating screen (some of the newest cameras have them). When you are ready to take the shot, you can quickly check the view finder and make sure everything is good and press the shutter. This will help you be aware of things happening around you.

5. Go Manual mode and shoot RAW

Set the camera in manual mode, shoot RAW. f11 to f18 is the sweet spot for aperture and open the shutter anywhere between 2 and 6 seconds depending on the variation in light to get the best shots. Frequently check your histogram to see how you are doing.

6. Look up

There will be times when you have to wait for a group of people to move before you can take a picture. So try to use that time to come up with different compositions. Look up and try to compose shots. Also remember including people in the picture is not always a bad thing to do.

7. Look for hidden slots

These canyons are spiritual to the Navajo tribes. They talk about the forms and shapes carved into the rock by water that flows through the canyons. One of the greatest pleasure in shooting these canyons is to see the unseen, find what is hidden, and put them in the center stage and show it in pictures. The stone in the picture below has taken a form of an eagle with open wings. To see more pictures of hidden forms visit my blogpost “Finding the hidden creatures”

8. Try to put people in the picture.

Bring some life to the pictures by placing a human subject. Here in this picture I requested a traveler from South America dressed in contrasting colors to be photographed which made the picture interesting.

9. High contrast

Look for frames with the most contrast to make it all that more interesting. You can find so many frames with high contrast between the darkest and brightest regions because of the shafts of light that penetrate from above make the center areas of the canyons brighter and the sides darker.

10. Carry a water bottle

Last but not least food is not allowed inside, so if you are planning to spend a good time in these canyons, have your food before entering the canyons and make sure to carry a water bottle with you.

Amar Ramesh is an emerging photographer from Redmond WA, USA. Photography, to him is a passion with infinite opportunities and he loves to share the lessons and tips that he learned with others. Please visit his Facebook Page for more. He is also in Flickr | Twitter | Portfolio.

Post from: Digital Photography School – Photography Tips.

10 Quick tips for Photographing Antelope Canyons

By Adam Pash, Lifehacker – July 28, 2010 at 11:45AM

You know when you’re walking through a large crowd and end up in step with someone else, then have to do that all-too-familiar back-and-forth dance until someone breaks free and you go around each other? Wired wants to help you avoid this.

Over at their How-To Wiki, tech culture site Wired offers a few quick tips for walking through crowds without getting caught in that dance or running into people. Some of the tips may sound obvious (e.g., “watch where you walk”), but it’s also full of good reason. For example:

To get on autopilot, pedestrian-style, look down at the feet of the people around you. The head and torso are lagging indicators and often give you bad information with regards to the speed and direction people are traveling. All that information is in the feet.

• Don’t look directly forward. Your gaze is generally perpendicular to your body, usually 90 degrees. Reduce that angle, making it tighter as your space becomes more crowded.
• Be aware of how crowded your “personal zone” is — use a 6-foot radius as a rule of thumb. Less than six people isn’t too crowded, so move as you would normally, but watch people’s feet as they enter your zone.
• Evade, don’t invade. Change direction often to slip behind people rather than rushing to cut them off.

Hit up the full post over at Wired for more suggestions. Got your own tried-and-true tips for making it through a crowded space? Tell us about them in the comments. Photo by Mr. T in DC.

By Simon Slangen, MakeUseOf – July 27, 2010 at 02:31PM

A lot of die-hard gamers might have heard of the Alien Swarm shooter game in the past. The game originated as a full-conversion mod for the popular arena shooter Unreal Tournament 2004; completely developed by a score of community developers.

Those same developers were subsequently hired by Valve, the top game publisher that’s behind Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2. While working on projects like Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal 2, in the background they were rebuilding their debut shooter game from scratch.

Alien Swarm

Steam (Valve’s gaming network) just recently revealed the existence of that remake, mere days before the game launched last Monday. But the accompanying news was even more shocking. This fully-featured game would be released for free.

What can you expect? Think swarms upon swarms of magnificently brutal aliens and empowering online (co-operative) gameplay. There’s not all that much of a story, just fast-packed shoot-em-up levels. This is a game you should play this summer – no matter if you’re usually a freeware or retail gamer. The only detectable downside is that this shooter game is only available on Windows PC’s.

4 Player Co-Op Killing Spree

Alien Swarm offers two modes of gameplay; the less important offline training mode and the online campaign mode. Up to four players can join up to compete and join hands against the alien horde. In that, it’s very similar to Left 4 Dead (2). In other things, not so much. There’s bound to be less randomization in the levels, in a way enabling you to learn from failed experiences, and develop tactics to beat the levels.

How difficult those levels will be is entirely up to you. Alien Swarm offers 4 degrees of difficulty; Easy, Normal, Hard and Insane. You’ll be assisted in your post-modern quest by over 40 different weapons, with an absurd amount of additional weapon configurations and other unlockable items.

There are in total four unique IAF (interstellar armed forces) player classes to choose from: medic, tech, officer and special weapons. And each of those feature two different characters. Create an IAF squad with your friends and make those aliens regret they got up in the morning.

Free, Open-Source & With Separate SDK

Actually, Steam didn’t just announce the game to be free. Yes, you can download the game free of charge. But you can also download the entire source code. This is unprecedented for a major game company like Valve, and rocked the socks off of large parts of the internet. This means that everyone can view the original programming that went into make this game. Everyone can adapt the code, and make spin-offs.

Although the game launched with 7 ‘official’ levels, you can also download a level creation kit. For those interested, this is not the standard kit that you’ll see included with other Valve games, but a stand-alone one. This includes a tile-based map generation tool, allowing you to randomly generate rooms in your home-brewed levels.

Are you excited yet? That’s right! What do you think of Alien Swarm, or it going open-source from day one? Let us know in the comments!

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By Kevin Purdy, Lifehacker – July 26, 2010 at 10:30AM

The Super User forums has a collection of tips and paste-able commands for Mac OS X’s Terminal that are, by turns, brilliant, funny, and obscure but great. Suggestions include quickly checking what apps are eating your memory (top -o vsize), run a Spotlight-style search from the command line (mdfind), and a clever little script that one user put together to trick his wife into thinking a MacBook has overheated and needs to be shut down—so he can grab it back. [Super User via Daring Fireball]

By Sebastian Anthony, Download Squad – July 26, 2010 at 09:00AM

Filed under: Internet, P2P

In what will surely become a landmark case — or at least a massive thorn in the MPAA and RIAA’s clubbed, pygmy feet — a judge has ruled that bypassing DRM via hacking, reverse engineering or any other means is not in itself illegal.

The case itself ruled that General Electric, in using hacked security dongles to repair some uninterruptible power supplies produced by another company, did not violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Why? Because the end goal was legal. If the hacked dongles had been used for the forces of evil, the story would be different.

While this doesn’t sound immediately applicable to DRM-protected software, music and movies, bear in mind that the DMCA is the foundation for every spurious copyright claim made by RIAA, MPAA and the myriad of other digital rights groups. In essence, this ruling means that you’re free to break DRM on media that you own. No longer is it illegal to rip your own DVDs or crippled audio CDs onto your hard disk. I think there might also be some implication for the godawful DRM used on contemporary games like Assassin’s Creed 2 (and if you’re a lawyer, please leave a comment!)

In case you were wondering, this doesn’t make piracy legal. It just means that bypassing DRM to reach a legal goal — i.e. fair use of things you own — is now protected by common law.

[via electronista]

Judge rules that circumventing DRM is not illegal originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 26 Jul 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Digital Millennium Copyright Act – Digital rights management – Intellectual property – Motion Picture Association of America – Law

By Darknet, Darknet – The Darkside – July 26, 2010 at 03:37AM

PlainSight is a versatile computer forensics environment that allows inexperienced forensic practitioners perform common tasks using powerful open source tools such as RegRipper, Pasco, Mork, Foremost and many more. We have taken the best open source forensic/security tools, customised them, and combined them with an intuitive user interface to…

Read the full post at darknet.org.uk

By Rosa Golijan, Gizmodo – July 25, 2010 at 07:00PM

This is simply a brief video played 300 times slower than it should be, showing the birth—and the death—of a lightning bolt. [Science Blogs via Twitter] More »

By (author unknown), Scientific American – July 24, 2010 at 11:00AM

[More]

By nipper, The Invent Blog – July 23, 2010 at 11:27AM

Kenneth Yip at Apsator e-mailed me to point out that they have a new version of their FireFox plugin available.  See:  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3142/.  He notes:

…the new version introduces two breakthrough features.  The first feature is to preview patent drawings in PNG format.  There is no need for TIFF plugin.  This not only reduces computer resource loading, but also allows printing the patent diagrams directly from the USPTO patent search result page.  The second feature is to use Google Translate to translate patent abstract directly.  These two features features hopefully will continue improve the effectiveness in reading patents.  A guideline on how to use Aspator can be found at https://www.slideshare.net/patentinfo/how-to-use-aspator-in-your-patent-search.

Other features he lists:

• Read searched patent abstracts, claims, drawings and bibliographies from USPTo and esp@cenet on one single page.
• Patent classification analyzer.
• Direct access to esp@cenet and Google Patent Search.
• Download PDF of a patent through pat2pdf.org.
• Download multiple patents in one single PDF file or in separate PDF files.
• Store your search records.

It is a very hand tool worth checking out.

Related posts:

1. Aspator (patent downloading tool) Updated Kenneth Yip from Aspator (Firefox plugin) sent me an email…
2. Patent Tool: Aspator (FireFox plugin) Aspator 0.92 Produced by a Hong Kong government owned non-profit…

By Mike Masnick, Techdirt. – July 23, 2010 at 10:55AM

We’ve been following a lawsuit over Bratz dolls for a few years now. It involved a guy who worked at Mattel (not in a position designing dolls). While there, he had an idea for a new line of dolls, and eventually negotiated a deal to create those dolls for competitor MGA. The new dolls became The Bratz, one of the few super successful doll lines to challenge the success of Barbie dolls. Somewhere along the line, Mattel realized that the guy had worked at Mattel, and claimed that his employment agreement meant Mattel owned pretty much all rights to Bratz dolls, and that MGA owed Mattel a billion dollars. A court sided with Mattel and didn’t just say that MGA and Bratz infringed, but effectively handed over all rights to Bratz dolls — including future plans. This made absolutely no sense to us. At the very least, if the court found that Mattel owned the rights to the original design, at most Mattel should have only been able to get damages for those original designs. Giving them rights to later designs makes no sense at all. MGA appealed noting that giving Mattel all of its plans, as demanded, would result in “devastating and irreversible consequences.” After sounding skeptical late last year, Judge Kozinski in the 9th circuit has now soundly rejected most of the lower court ruling (pdf).

The ruling itself is a really good read, especially if you’re interested in the difference between ideas and expression, and making sure that copyright only covers the copyrightable part of an expression. A common misconception is that copyright covers an entire work. In some cases, that’s not true. Only parts of a work may get copyright protection:

Among the notable parts, the judge is troubled by the lower courts ruling that Bryant’s design work that was done after hours automatically is given to Mattel. As he notes, the employment agreement says inventions that are developed while employed belong to Mattel — and the definition of inventions does not include “ideas.” And, since IP system defenders are always quick to point out that inventions and ideas are not the same thing, the judge notes that it’s not at all clear that the employment agreement covers the idea of the Bratz dolls. At the very least, the court says the lower court shouldn’t have ruled on summary judgment that the idea of Bratz dolls automatically belonged to Mattel. The court also noted that the terms of the employment agreement were ambiguous, such that it wasn’t at all clear or obvious if things done on personal time were covered by the agreement.

But more interesting is the discussion of how much of the IP would belong to Mattel even if it’s determined that MGA infringed. Kozinski clearly has problems with the decision to assign all current and future plans to Mattel, pointing out that this seems to be based on a misreading of the case law. He notes that the law does allow appreciation in value to go to the rightful owner, but mainly if that appreciation in value is due to external factors. He finds it quite troubling that Mattel should be given all of the value created through MGA’s hard work:

Even assuming that MGA
took some ideas wrongfully, it added tremendous value by
turning the ideas into products and, eventually, a popular and
highly profitable brand. The value added by MGA’s hard
work and creativity dwarfs the value of the original ideas Bryant
brought with him, even recognizing the significance of
those ideas….

It is not equitable to transfer this billion dollar brand–
the value of which is overwhelmingly the result of MGA’s
legitimate efforts–because it may have started with two misappropriated
names. The district court’s imposition of a constructive
trust forcing MGA to hand over its sweat equity was
an abuse of discretion and must be vacated.

The next part highlights that just because there were similarities between the original ideas and the Bratz dolls, it doesn’t mean Mattel should get all ownership. If it is determined that Mattel holds the copyright (again, still somewhat in dispute), it should only be limited to the parts of the dolls that are covered by the copyright. Here’s where the narrow protections of copyright law come into play:

In order to determine the scope of protection for the
sculpt, we must first filter out any unprotectable elements.
Producing small plastic dolls that resemble young females is
a staple of the fashion doll market. To this basic concept, the
Bratz dolls add exaggerated features, such as an oversized
head and feet. But many fashion dolls have exaggerated
features–take the oversized heads of the Blythe dolls and My
Scene Barbies as examples. Moreover, women have often
been depicted with exaggerated proportions similar to those of
the Bratz dolls–from Betty Boop to characters in Japanese
anime and Steve Madden ads. The concept of depicting a
young, fashion-forward female with exaggerated features,
including an oversized head and feet, is therefore unoriginal
as well as an unprotectable idea….

It’s true that there’s a broad range of
expression for bodies with exaggerated features: One could
make a fashion doll with a large nose instead of a small one,
or a potbelly instead of a narrow waist. But there’s not a big
market for fashion dolls that look like Patty and Selma Bouvier.
Little girls buy fashion dolls with idealized proportions
–which means slightly larger heads, eyes and lips; slightly
smaller noses and waists; and slightly longer limbs than those
that appear routinely in nature. But these features can be
exaggerated only so much: Make the head too large or the
waist too small and the doll becomes freakish, not idealized.

….

The
only unprotectable elements the district court identified were:
(1) the dolls’ resemblance to humans; (2) the presence of hair,
head, two eyes and other human features; (3) human clothes,
shoes and accessories; (4) age, race, ethnicity and “urban” or
“rural” appearances; (5) standard features relative to others
(like a thin body); and (6) other standard treatments of the
subject matter. And it reasoned that the doll’s
“[p]articularized, synergistic compilation and expression of
the human form and anatomy that expresses a unique style
and conveys a distinct look or attitude” is protectable, along
with the doll fashions that expressed an “aggressive, contemporary,
youthful style.” But Mattel can’t claim a monopoly
over fashion dolls with a bratty look or attitude, or dolls sporting
trendy clothing–these are all unprotectable ideas….

This error was significant. Although substantial similarity
was the appropriate standard, a finding of substantial
similarity between two works can’t be based on similarities in
unprotectable elements. When works of art
share an idea, they’ll often be “similar” in the layman’s sense
of the term. For example, the stuffed, cuddly dinosaurs… were
similar in that they were all stuffed, cuddly dinosaurs–but
that’s not the sort of similarity we look for in copyright law….

MGA’s Bratz dolls can’t be considered substantially
similar to Bryant’s preliminary sketches simply because the
dolls and sketches depict young, stylish girls with big heads
and an attitude. Yet this appears to be how the district court
reasoned

When we wrote about this case earlier, it kicked off quite a discussion. Many people insisted that because Bryant designed the dolls while employed by Mattel, Mattel easily deserved all of the benefits accrued by MGA. It’s great to see Kozinski point out that this is not true, and recognize that there’s a big difference between ideas, expression and execution, as well as highlighting the difference between copyright covering an entire product and just the protectable parts of a product. While one would hope all judges would understand this, clearly, many do not.

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