To learn to create evocative light with flash, it helps to better understand how we experience the continuous light we see every day.
To do that, you'll need to wean yourself from auto white balance, and even to abandon familiar waypoints like your daylight WB preset. Because our goal is to learn to exist in a more fluid way along the Kelvin scale. Read more »
Strobist
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A Texas appeals court has ruled that the University of Houston does not have to pay the photographer of a picture it has been using in online and print promotional materials. Houston photographer Jim Olive says the university removed copyright markings from an image downloaded from his stock library, failed to credit him when it was used and wouldn’t pay when he sent a bill, but the university claims it has sovereign immunity and that it can’t be sued.
The case surrounds an aerial image Olive shot from a helicopter hired specifically for making pictures for his library. In an online image search, he found the university was using it on its website and then in printed materials. When it failed to pay an invoice he sent for the usage Olive tried to sue the university, but it claimed that under the Eleventh Amendment it couldn’t be sued as it is a state institution.
In an attempt to get around this Olive tried to sue the University of Houston for taking his property – in which case even government agencies would have to compensate the owner. The Court of Appeals though has said that the university’s actions didn’t comprise ‘taking’ and that Olive will have to pay the university’s legal costs.
The Court of Appeals though has said that the university’s actions didn’t comprise ‘taking’ and that Olive will have to pay the university’s legal costs.
According to a report in the Houston Chronicle, which described the success of the university as ‘a big win’, Olive said ‘It just doesn’t seem fair to me.’
If this ruling is allowed to stand it would seem that any state institution can use images and other intellectual property without having to pay the originators, a precedent that would be damaging to photographers across the country, because if that’s the case in Texas, it may well be true in all other states covered by the Eleventh Amendment.
The detailed ruling concerning the appeal heard in the Court of Appeals for The First District of Texas by Justice Richard Hightower can be read on CaseText, and the applications from the start of the case can be seen on the Copyright Alliance website. Ironically, the university has a page on its site to allow users to report copyright infringements – and to request permission to use UH intellectual Property.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
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| Photo: Samsung |
Samsung has reached another solid state storage milestone with its newly-announced Serial Attached SCSI PM1643 30TB SSD. The drive, which was developed for enterprise use, has double the capacity of the 15.36TB SSD Samsung introduced in early 2016. The company packed 512Gb V-NAND chips alongside 1TB NAND flash packages into the new drive, the combination enabling it to offer a 30TB capacity in a 2.5-inch form factor.
“With our launch of the 30.72TB SSD,” Samsung’s Jaesoo Han explained, “we are once again shattering the enterprise storage capacity barrier, and in the process, opening up new horizons for ultra-high capacity storage systems worldwide.”
In addition to hitting a record capacity, Samsung explains that its PM1643 is the first SSD to feature Through Silicon Via (TSV)-applied DRAM, which totals 40GB in this model. The company also managed to include an endurance level that supports writing 30.72TB of data to the drive every day for five years (the warranty period) without failure, an error correction code (ECC) algorithm for reliability, software offering sudden power failure and metadata protection, and sequential read/write speeds up to 2,100MB/s and 1,700MB/s.
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| Photo: Samsung |
Samsung plans to offer other versions of this drive with capacities ranging from 800GB to 15.36TB. As for the 30.72TB model, the South Korean company explains that it started producing “initial quantities” of the drive last month, with lineup expansion planned for later in 2018.
The drive price isn’t listed, but we’re less excited about this specific drive (since it’s an enterprise drive) and more excited about the tech trickling down into consumer-focused higher capacity SSDs that photographers and videographers can use for backups.
Read the full press release below for more details about these drives.
New ‘PM1643’ is built on latest 512Gb V-NAND to offer the most advanced storage, featuring industry-first 1TB NAND flash package, 40GB of DRAM, new controller and custom software
Korea on February 20, 2018 – Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has begun mass producing the industry’s largest capacity Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid state drive (SSD) – the PM1643 – for use in next-generation enterprise storage systems. Leveraging Samsung’s latest V-NAND technology with 64-layer, 3-bit 512-gigabit (Gb) chips, the 30.72 terabyte (TB) drive delivers twice the capacity and performance of the previous 15.36TB high-capacity lineup introduced in March 2016.
This breakthrough was made possible by combining 32 of the new 1TB NAND flash packages, each comprised of 16 stacked layers of 512Gb V-NAND chips. These super-dense 1TB packages allow for approximately 5,700 5-gigabyte (GB), full HD movie files to be stored within a mere 2.5-inch storage device.
In addition to the doubled capacity, performance levels have risen significantly and are nearly twice that of Samsung’s previous generation high-capacity SAS SSD. Based on a 12Gb/s SAS interface, the new PM1643 drive features random read and write speeds of up to 400,000 IOPS and 50,000 IOPS, and sequential read and write speeds of up to 2,100MB/s and 1,700 MB/s, respectively. These represent approximately four times the random read performance and three times the sequential read performance of a typical 2.5-inch SATA SSD*.
“With our launch of the 30.72TB SSD, we are once again shattering the enterprise storage capacity barrier, and in the process, opening up new horizons for ultra-high capacity storage systems worldwide,” said Jaesoo Han, executive vice president, Memory Sales & Marketing Team at Samsung Electronics. “Samsung will continue to move aggressively in meeting the shifting demand toward SSDs over 10TB and at the same time, accelerating adoption of our trail-blazing storage solutions in a new age of enterprise systems.”
Samsung reached the new capacity and performance enhancements through several technology progressions in the design of its controller, DRAM packaging and associated software. Included in these advancements is a highly efficient controller architecture that integrates nine controllers from the previous high-capacity SSD lineup into a single package, enabling a greater amount of space within the SSD to be used for storage. The PM1643 drive also applies Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology to interconnect 8Gb DDR4 chips, creating 10 4GB TSV DRAM packages, totaling 40GB of DRAM. This marks the first time that TSV-applied DRAM has been used in an SSD.
Complementing the SSD’s hardware ingenuity is enhanced software that supports metadata protection as well as data retention and recovery from sudden power failures, and an error correction code (ECC) algorithm to ensure high reliability and minimal storage maintenance. Furthermore, the SSD provides a robust endurance level of one full drive write per day (DWPD), which translates into writing 30.72TB of data every day over the five-year warranty period without failure. The PM1643 also offers a mean time between failures (MTBF) of two million hours.
Samsung started manufacturing initial quantities of the 30.72TB SSDs in January and plans to expand the lineup later this year – with 15.36TB, 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB and 800GB versions – to further drive the growth of all-flash-arrays and accelerate the transition from hard disk drives (HDDs) to SSDs in the enterprise market. The wide range of models and much improved performance will be pivotal in meeting the growing storage needs in a host of market segments, including the government, financial services, healthcare, education, oil & gas, pharmaceutical, social media, business services, retail and communications sectors.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
And resources for further exploration, educational standards describe what students should know and be able to do in each subject in each grade. Keep an eye state district act test 2017 administration manual pdf paper the newspaper columns, use the keyword search and filters to find specific resources at Common Core Search. Org File Layout […]
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[ By WebUrbanist in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]
It’s the third-largest city in California by land area but most people (including many in CA) have never even heard of this mostly-empty desert oasis, home to around 15,000 people. It’s not quite a city, but not quite a ghost town either.
Visiting the area is a bit surreal – roads running through its 200 square miles connect nothing to nothing in the hot Mojave, in some cases following straight lines and in others wrapping to form cul-de-sacs.
Some roads are paved, but most aren’t. In places, nature has started to reclaim the dirty gravel strips with hearty desert plants growing right up through streets.
Photographer Noritaka Minami recently took a trip in a helicopter to photograph the strange sprawling semi-ghost town, which are on display at On Freedom, an exhibition at Aperture for another month.
The place was a mid-century vision of a real estate developer named Nathan Mendelshon who purchased over 80,000 acres, imagining California City as a fresh metropolis for a growing state.
Some parcels were resold but never developed — others were bought and remain in use, mainly for people working at a nearby military base or prison.
The few houses that do exist seem almost stranger than the framework of roads around them, neatly fenced in a neighborhood of empty plots.
More from Minami: “This project focuses on California City, a master planned community in the Mojave Desert conceived by sociologist turned real estate developer Nathan K. Mendelsohn in 1958. California City was envisioned as the next major metropolis in California in response to the population and economic growths after World War II. This development was based on the belief that even in a harsh desert landscape, mankind had the freedom and power to produce a built environment that provided all of the essential needs for a prosperous modern life.”
In his series of black-and-white images, “aerial photography is used to document the scale of the vision Mendelsohn proposed in the desert and question whether this ‘wonderland’ could have even been sustainable in this environment. Despite having the foundation for a city in place, there are no indications that this city will ever be realized in the future.” In the end, half-built may be an overstatement — in reality, the place is more like a skeletal outline of a city, punctuated (like a normal rural landscape) by pockets of development and clusters of community.
[ By WebUrbanist in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]
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| Photo via @Seagate |
At the Flash Memory Summit conference Seagate has today announced a 60TB solid-state-drive (SSD), the largest capacity SSD at this point in time. Seagate say the driver has four times the capacity and twice the density of the next largest competing unit and could store approximately 12,000 DVD-quality movies or 400 million photos.
Thanks to its enterprise HDD 3.5-inch form factor, swapping out and connecting drives is very easy, increasing data accessibility in data centers that have to estimate short term versus long term data accessibility and storage needs. And thanks to its flexible architecture, it also provides a way for data centers to easily grow from the current 60TB capacity to 100TB of data or more in the future, using the same form factor.
The bad news is that the Seagate 60TB SSD is currently only available for demonstration purposes and will only make its debut some time in 2017. So you’ll have to look for an intermediate solution if you current image storage is running out of capacity. Seagate has not given any information on pricing yet but says the drive will represent the lowest current cost per GB for flash memory once it is available.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
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Hard disk drive giant Western Digital has completed its acquisition of flash manufacturer SanDisk in a deal that will create a partnership that WD hopes will help it leap into the future of computer memory. The company announced plans to buy SanDisk last fall.
Western Digital’s reliance on spinning disk technology in a world that is swiftly moving towards solid state drives has been a cause for concern for the company that currently claims 44% market share for HDDs. Acquiring the world’s largest producer of NAND flash memory should settle some nerves.
Western Digital is said to be interested in cloud storage and computing solutions as PC sales continue to decline, so SanDisk’s know-how in flash data center technologies that provide more capacity in a smaller space, with less heat and faster communication have proven attractive.
All told, the deal cost Western Digital $ 17 billion in cash and shares, $ 2 billion short of initial estimates. The company expects to be able to make significant savings through economies of scale, expecting combined revenue of almost $ 20 billion with a better position to compete against Samsung and Micron.
For more information visit the SanDisk and Western Digital websites.
Press release:
Western Digital® Corporation (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary Western Digital Technologies, Inc. has completed the acquisition of SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK). The addition of SanDisk makes Western Digital Corporation a comprehensive storage solutions provider with global reach, and an extensive product and technology platform that includes deep expertise in both rotating magnetic storage and non-volatile memory (NVM).
The Company also indicated that the debt financing associated with this transaction has been consummated and that the previously obtained funds from this financing have been released from escrow to Western Digital Technologies, Inc.
“Today is a significant day in the history of Western Digital,” said Steve Milligan, chief executive officer of Western Digital. “We are delighted to welcome SanDisk into the Western Digital family. This transformational combination creates a media-agnostic leader in storage technology with a robust portfolio of products and solutions that will address a wide range of applications in almost all of the world’s computing and mobile devices. We are excited to now begin focusing on the many opportunities before us, from leading innovation to bringing the best of what we can offer as a combined company to our customers. In addition, we will begin the work to fully realize the value of this combination through executing on our synergies, generating significant cash flow, as well as rapidly deleveraging our balance sheet, and creating significant long-term value for our shareholders.”
The integration process will begin immediately through the joint efforts of teams from both companies. As previously announced, Steve Milligan will continue to serve as chief executive officer of Western Digital, which will remain headquartered in Irvine, California. Sanjay Mehrotra, co-founder, president and chief executive officer of SanDisk, will serve as a member of the Western Digital Board of Directors, effective immediately.
“As a combined company, we will be best positioned to address the demands for data storage, which is growing exponentially every year,” said Sanjay Mehrotra. “Growth and change go hand in hand, and we couldn’t be happier to grow and change together with Western Digital. I look forward to contributing to realizing the potential of this combination as a member of the board.”
Under the terms of the transaction, each outstanding share of SanDisk common stock was converted into the right to receive $ 67.50 per share in cash and 0.2387 shares of Western Digital common stock.
SanDisk shareholders looking for information with regard to the payment of the merger consideration should review the Public FAQ available in the Investor Relations section of our website at investor.wdc.com or click here.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
[ By Steve in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]
Florida may be America’s Sunshine State but these odd abandoned wonders reveal a darker side to the land of oranges, alligators and retirement communities.
Speaking of ‘gators, who ever thought that primeval, carnivorous reptilian monsters would make an alluring and enduring tourist trap? Lotsa folks, actually, though often as not their efforts were unsuccessful – more on that later. Jungleland Zoo in Kissimmee, Florida was one such failed alligator-themed attraction. Originally established in the 1970’s as “Alligator Safari Zoo”, the place changed both its name and its management in 1995.
The more things change, the more they stay the same… such was the case with Jungleland. Criticism from state and federal wildlife and animal welfare agencies punctuated by the widely-publicized escape of a 450-lb lioness led the the place being shut down and abandoned in 2002. The 126-foot long alligator statue which stood in front of the on-site Gator Motel was demolished in October of 2014. Flickr user amysusanne’s photo set dating from August of 2012 allows us to recall the singular glory of an enormous artificial alligator eating a car.
Let the Space Age begin! The First Federal Savings and Loan Association of Cocoa, Cocoa Beach Branch opened in 1962 and featured the Sky Room restaurant – a likely hangout for Major Nelson and Jeannie.
Dreams must confront reality sometime, however, and in 2004 Hurricane Frances damaged the Glass Bank‘s lower floors so severely it never re-opened. Shattered windows enabled ingress by vandals and encouraged the spread of toxic mold. By 2014 the City had had enough: demolition (watch it here) was approved and within a year this iconic building was no more.
The so-called “Alien House” in Homestead, Florida, was built in 1974 – purportedly by a big-time drug trafficker whose cover was being a big-cat exotic animal importer. Sounds legit!
The house was purchased by a doctor from New York shortly before Hurricane Andrew struck in 1992; the powerful storm rendered the unconventional abode uninhabitable by man or beast. The structure then sat abandoned, accumulating an abundance of graffiti, until late 2013 when it was finally demolished.
When the late great Robert Burns wrote “the best laid schemes of Mice and Men oft go awry, leaving us nothing but grief and pain,” he could have been describing the sad saga of the Sugarloaf Key Bat Tower (also known as the Perky Bat Tower) in Monroe County, Florida.
Built in 1929 at a (for the time) staggering cost of $ 10,000 in a well-meaning effort to house mosquito-eating Mexican Free-Tailed bats, the 30-foot-tall tower was immediately abandoned by the hundreds of bats procured to stock it. Great depression then ensued – in more ways than one. Over 80 years later the still bat-less tower still stands on Sugarloaf Key, mocked by man and mosquito alike.
Painted pink and encrusted with graffiti, the abandoned UFO House in Homestead, Florida, has a backstory as mysterious as its otherworldly architecture.
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There’s a lot more to America’s southernmost state than the headline-worthy misadventures of Florida Man and Florida Woman. Culturally distinct from the …
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A fortress on an isolated island off the coast of Florida was abandoned for nearly a century before becoming part of a national park.
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[ By Steve in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]
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Commercial Photographer and camera blogger Ming Thein has shot with almost as many mirrorless cameras as we have, and has put together a list of all the things they get wrong or, at least, all the things he thinks they should all do. It’s a fairly comprehensive list that we very much agree with. Thein echoes a lot of our own concerns about camera handling, behavior and operation, as he works through camera design point-by-point. Read more
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Gary Stochl ist als Straßenfotograf noch nicht lange bekannt. Das undenkbare Gegenteil ist der Fall. Stochl fotografierte vom 17. Lebensjahr an sage und schreibe 40 (!) Jahre lange auf den Straßen von Chicago. 2004 entschied er sich, seine Fotos dem Photography Department der Columbia College Chicago zu zeigen. Heute verkauft er Vintage Prints für 1500 $ .
Das Bild, das ich heute vorstelle, stammt von Gary Stochl. Es bekam keinen Namen, wie alle seine Bilder. Nur Ort und Jahr sind bekannt, wie der Titel des Blickfangs beschreibt. Lassen wir erst einmal das Foto auf uns wirken.
Das Foto ist in typischer Stochl-Manier, kein Ausreißer. Es ist düster, dunkel und hat einen faden Beigeschmack. Stochl selbst sagt, er habe nichts gegen Glücklichsein, es wäre nur einfach nicht sein Wesenszug. So sehen wir hier einen echten Stochl, mit viel Schwarz und einer Person.
Stochl hat das Bild nicht beschnitten, sonden den Wolkenkratzer im Hintergrund gelassen. So bleibt der urbane Kontext erhalten, jedoch fällt mein Blick unweigerlich auf die linke Hand des Mannes, der in der anderen Hand Bücher und Papier hält.
Ich habe dieses Foto schon einige Male überflogen, doch ich entschied mich, heute mal genauer hinzusehen und das Foto einem längeren Studium zu unterziehen. Und die grundsätzliche Frage, die dieses Bild aufwirft ist:
Hä?
In lang: Was macht dieser Mensch eigentlich? Hält er sich fest? Berührt er gar einen anderen Menschen? Oder drückt er sich nur an die Wand? Schiebt er etwas weg?
Das spannende an der Fotografie ist ja, wie Gary Winogrand (von dem Stochl beeinflusst war) sagte, dass es kein Vorher und kein Nachher gibt. Des Rätsels Lösung liegt in den Sekunden davor oder in denen danach.
Und doch ist es mir das Foto lieber als die Lösung. Denn so behält das Bild eine Magie, etwas Komisches, Unübliches. Und genau das ist es, was ich an Stochls Fotos mag, die ich allesamt im Buch „On City Streets, Chicago 1964-2004“* gefunden habe.
* Das ist ein Affiliate-Link zu Amazon. Wenn Ihr darüber etwas bestellt, erhalten wir eine kleine Provision, Ihr zahlt aber keinen Cent mehr.
kwerfeldein – Fotografie Magazin
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