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 scene. The hero and heroine are sitting by a window. He’s telling her some terrible… [Read More]
Archives for September 2011
Bad Lighting
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 – lighting so bad that it shatters the willing suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy a… [Read More]
I’ve been cropped!
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 asked her about context. She said that the publication, Edible Monterey Bay, was a regional… [Read More]
VoIP — part 8
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 VoIP, you want IP trunks. However, there are advantages to an IP local voice network:… [Read More]
VoIP — part 7
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, launch the app – which takes a minute or so to establish communications with the… [Read More]