Some of the films I have loved (Click for larger…)
I have nothing against film. I like film. I’ve been using it since I started photographing around 1990, when I appropriated my mom’s Pentax-mount Ricoh just before our trip to Yellowstone. (After getting my first real job I bought into the Nikon system […]

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I haven’t done much with my perhaps overly ambitious project to examine contemporary Indian art photography. Last year on a short trip to the time-warp Iowa, I collected some notes on the many photographs I found on the web. And I did manage to make it to Harvard last month to attend a […]

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Spring is officially over, but I’m continuing to make mistakes with my large format camera. Not a lot of mistakes. Not major mistakes, just little mistakes. But I’m really glad that I’ve been learning close to home so that I can make changes before our big trip. (Next Monday we start […]

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As promised before, here are some more notes from the classes that I’ve taken as part of my soon-to-be-completed Master of Software Engineering degree. This time: (software) project management. Most of this information comes from Effective Project Management by Robert K. Wysocki.
FYI, this was one of the few classes where most of […]

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I just realized I have this biggish, vaguely-annotated bibliography of almost 400 works on early American and Western American history. It’s neither current nor authoritative and only goes through 2002, but it’s free and might have a hidden gem or two.
You can download the bibliography in EndNote 4 format. (Hey, it’s been a […]

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It’s time for me to own up to something: I possess a much larger than average collection of books and notes about the Indian Removal Act, the Early National Period, and the Nullification Crisis. Like Louis P. Masur, I think 1831 was one of the most interesting years in American history. Through a […]

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I was talking with someone the other day about photography and terrorism plots. I’ve written about this before. And now that I’m using a large format camera, it seems even more ridiculous that someone in plain-view with a camera should be worthy of suspicion.
Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. […]

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Avoid str2double and str2num. Use sscanf instead.
For scalars, you’ll see a modest improvement.

>> str = ‘0009′;
>> tic; for p=1:1000, str2num(str); end; toc
Elapsed time is 0.126388 seconds.
>> tic; for p=1:1000, sscanf(str, ‘%d’); end; toc
Elapsed time is 0.022299 seconds.

>> str = ‘3.14159265′;
>> tic; for p=1:1000, str2double(str); end; toc
Elapsed time is 0.056466 seconds.
>> tic; for p=1:1000, sscanf(str, […]

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It’s still spring — even though it was 96ºF outside today and 92º in the house — and I’m still making mistakes. If you missed it, you can still read about the first batch of mistakes I made with my newish 4×5 large format camera.
The first go-round assumed that I was doing things right […]

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Here’s a follow-up to my dispatch from January about Hany Farid’s presentation at Electronic Imaging on detecting digital manipulation of images. Dr. Farid has written an article on digital forensics in this month’s issue of Scientific American.
(Thanks to Steve on Image Processing for the link.)

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