Gareth,

I was referring to the big black blob (i.e. the shadow of the fly). You are right, the spots are on the leaf.

I must have hit a low spot with this thread, shortly before Christmas and no financial crisis in sight. Sigh, those were the days...

Prieni

Hey Stefan,

are you on a trip down memory lane? This one is almost two years old!

Thanks for commenting on this. It was a feeble attempt to recreate something like the one I took on Maui (see here).

Of course I can clone out the spots on the leaf, but I thought it's not worth it...

Prieni

More like 18 months later...

Tim: Have to look that one up, it was evening (i.e. around sunset) in April, taken in Warnemünde, which is at the Baltic coast, about 150 km or so away from the Polish border.

Cheers,
Prieni

And by this they most probably mean "We'll think about a change to the human rights."

I have no problems with an ID card, even do carry it most of the time. If my government would plan on introducing them now and giving some shady reasons like terrorism, I certainly would get a bit paranoid. We had ID cards in the late 60s and early 70s, they didn't help against terrorism at all.

It would make ID a bit easier (I was very surprised when opening a bank account in the UK I needed a utility bill) but all in all it doesn't do you a huge service in everyday life. Life worked without them so far in the UK and I'm sure life will go on without them just fine.

Prieni

No problem with FF on Windows 7. Didn't have any problems with FF on XP either.

Prieni

Well, Mike would be the right person to answer this one.
I'll give it a try:
Set the exposure with disabled flash short enough to end up with a black image (it doesn't have to be that dark, really, just give it a try).
Then enable the flash and take care that the background is not lit by the flash or so far away and dark that almost no light is reflected back to the camera.

This is an example where it wasn't really that dark but I used a short shutter speed (high speed sync on the flashes) to get the dark background.

Hope this helps,
Prieni

Edit: Mike is the man to answer and has done so already...

Put some tin foil around the ID card and no one will read the RFID tag...

Prieni

I hope you all don't have mobile phones with you...

Prieni

Mhuni,

I basically did a very similar thing to my 5th post in this thread (Venice II). That is, load into Corel PhotoPaint, apply local equalization (I think the radius was something around 100). Then put the new version as a new layer over the old one and use soft light as the layer mode.
I put another layer with soft light on top of that and painted the light parts of the "handrail" over with black.
I think that was it. All in all perhaps five minutes.

Prieni

I do like the composition and there certainly is something in it. I tried a little variation on it:

[IMG]http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t5/Prieni/mikew_alt.jpg[/IMG]

But I'm sure it's better to go there again when the light is a bit more favourable.

Prieni