karlauerbach

@[email protected] Our nearby power station - Moss Landing - has been torn down over the last few months leaving only the two prodigious smoke stacks. Those stacks can be seen from all around the Monterey Bay and from out at sea. The power station itself was mostly open to the outside, hence not particularly good for redevelopment except as one of the world's largest (if not the largest) grid battery systems (actually two systems.)

@[email protected] I agree that black and white can show us things that are in front of our eyes but we do not see.

Lange's famous photo of a dust-bowl refugee woman and her children would have been transformed from a pained, desperate person into an entirely different thing, a Madonna, had it been in color.

I've gone into the Alabama Hills (near Lone Pine, California) where a large number of black and white films were made. I go to the various locations, get my eyes to see things from the camera's angles, and I'm distracted by the colors.

Imagine things like the opening scene of Woody Allen's film Manhattan done in color? No way.

The other night I re-watched the 1949 short film "Pacific 231" - the film's power would have been reduced had it been in color.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw-DukkgAmk

@[email protected] I love your photos; I wish I had your eye for images and framing, and your technical skill. And I'm a big fan of black and white.

It's just that in the case of these houses, the sameness is brought to a new qualitative realm by their limited color palette, a realm that speaks in a voice quite different from the uniformity of blue-and-white color of places like Santorini in Greece.

(One has to wonder why, so many decades after they were constructed, that so many of these houses remain in those few pastel hues.)

It's sort of like a those blanket-cloth long coats worn when Monty Python members would dress as women - black and white doesn't quite capture the flairless sameness that my eyes instantly noticed when we would go into a working district pub in England in the 1970s.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Black and white masks the limited range of pastel paints used on many of these houses, particularly in Daly City.

@[email protected] Wow, it is so detailed that I can pick out Jack LaLanne, in handcuffs, swimming from Alcatraz to San Francisco! Wow!

@[email protected] Does William Powell ("The Thin Man", 1934 film) live there?

@[email protected] You need an astronomer's adaptive lens with some sodium lasers to measure what real-time adaptations are needed.

@[email protected] It does not get the full impact without the pastel colors of the houses.

@dwallach @mattblaze I have yet to experience from a digital photographic system the joy and excitement of watching an image emerge from a sheet of photographic paper as it sits in the developer tray.

@[email protected] I dated Tracy back when I was at UCLA, but she did not look quite that spindly and her legs were not that long.

By-the-way, the town of Tracy is still there although it can be hard to find among the increasing number of giant distribution warehouses and trucking companies.

@[email protected] My astronomer friends might disagree that atmospheric effects are greater the further the astronomical subject.

But aside from my poor (very poor) joke, has anyone doing terrestrial photography adopted the technique used by astronomers of using a laser beam to do real time measure of atmospheric conditions and use that either in real-time lens/mirror adaption or post processing?

@dangillmor While I lean in favor of what you suggest, I fear that "interoperability" will be difficult. This is because, as we discovered over the years with IETF defined protocols, that many groups implement only the minimal core of a protocol or standard, and often do so in ways that are not particularly robust in their response to interactions with slightly different implementations or when network conditions become something less than the perfect, noiseless conditions found on developer networks.

And one need look no further than the awful state of e-mail interoperability today.

My business is building tools to allow implementers the means to test their implementations in less-than-optimal conditions. It is surprising how often even long-deployed code wobbles or fails.