Monthly Archives: September 2011

The big lighting giveaway

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Jim

In my last post, I talked about some really bad lighting in a couple of movies from the 60s. Lighting has improved a lot since then, but there’s one place where, even today, almost nobody gets it right. Picture a … Continue reading →

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Bad Lighting

Posted on September 17, 2011 by Jim

We photographers are consumed with lighting and light. It’s right up there with where to stand, where to point the camera, and when to release the shutter. In the last two days, I’ve watched two movies with unrealistic lighting – … Continue reading →

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I’ve been cropped!

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Jim

A few months ago, woman who is starting a magazine (a courageous woman, given the state of the print publishing industry) asked me if she could run some pictures from This Green Growing Land, my series on farm workers. I … Continue reading →

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VoIP — part 8

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Jim

The new PBX is not fully shaken down, but I’m far enough along that I can offer some (provisionally) final thoughts. Having an IP internal phone network and analog trunks is probably not optimum. To get all the advantages of … Continue reading →

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VoIP — part 7

Posted on September 4, 2011 by Jim

One nice thing about IP PBXs: any computer can be a phone. NEC provides software to do just that. You have to buy a license and install it on the PBX, and after that, you just put on your headset, … Continue reading →

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VoIP — part 6

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Jim

Now that I was going back to the analog trunks, I had a voicemail problem. With only two trunks, taking an incoming call and forwarding it to cloud-based voicemail would use up all the trunks. I could have AT&T do … Continue reading →

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VoIP — part 5

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Jim

After I decided on the NEC SV 8100 PBX, the next big decision was selecting an IP trunk vendor. In this country, Internet Protocol trunks are usually called SIP trunks, after the Session Initiation Protocol that most of them use. … Continue reading →

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VoIP — part 4

Posted on September 1, 2011 by Jim

On to the on-site IP PBX options. If you like rolling your own, the most open, customizable, and versatile option is to take any old computer, and load software onto it that turns it into a PBX. If all of … Continue reading →

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