Hyram,

I think we should both go now and wash our mouth with soap

Prieni

Hi Pete,

nice to see you stopping bye.
I can't begin to imagine how difficult the MCP exam must be, at least judging by how weird their applications behave.
So congratulations on passing the exams!

Prieni

That's bad, everyone knows that it is 1 hour (plus about 20 years)

Prieni

Stefan,

you're absolutely right, the measurements are critical. And no, usually the in situ sensors are not as good as lab analysis (with the exception of temperature and conductivity (that you need to determine salinity) perhaps).
The advantages of in situ sensors are that you get a better temporal resolution. One example: With a moored sensor you can take a reading every hour (or faster) over weeks. With a good sized research vessel costing around 20kEuro per day plus salaries for the scientists on board you can do the sums what a measurement per hour costs over two weeks.

With a fast measuring sensor you also get depth profiles of the parameters. When you take water samples you get about 24 depths per haul.

Another example: With an in situ ammonia sensor you minimize the risk of contamination. Some labs have stopped doing ammonia measurements because of contamination.
The concentrations of the chemical species we are interested in are usually quite low (picomolar to micromolar mostly) and have to be measured in a salt solution that is about molar.

This is it in very short words.
Prieni

#1: The right side is not pulling it's weight, I feel. The part I find most interesting is at the bottom a bit to the right, the white blurred bit of water. I think that you wanted to get the bigger fall in the background in the picture. But with the wide angle lens you could have gone closer on the white water in the foreground and still have that bigger fall in the background.
But of course I don't know if that had been possible.
The left side looks a bit too busy for my taste.

#2 The water looks a bit too blue to me. Warming up the colour a bit would also benefit the surroundings.
Also it looks like the highlights are a bit blown (but I'm not sure on that). Somehow I would expect the whites to lead the eye through the picture, but instead my eyes follow an awkward left/right/left downward path.

On both pics my feeling is that you wanted to get too much of the falls in your picture and you ended up with too much of the surroundings. The pictures lost their focus.

#1 for me is the better one.

Prieni

I hope it was the right kind of impression.

So far it's right. What I saw certainly looked more like the pp'ed version. It seems that our brains do a pretty good job of 'auto contrast'.

The colour has not much to do with exposure. That's the domain of white balance. The auto exposure of the camera would assume a 17% grey also when pointed at a red wall. And that wouldn't come out grey.
I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that this is not news to you.

(BTW: In this case exposure correction was set to +1 EV.)

Prieni

That's cruel, I can't . At least I know that the camera arrived at Pentax in Hamburg today.

And my *istD doesn't play ball, I got to the date and time setting screen, but whatever button I press, no effect.

Prieni

I got the Arctic butterfly 724 kit. Have used it twice on my K20 (:cry without any problems. Did the job.
The wet cleaner and pads I haven't had to try, yet.

Prieni

Stefan,

I'm involved in developing in situ sensors for oceanography (in situ meaning that you can throw them in the ocean and they do the measurement in the water).
You can find some background info on my work and one of the things I'm working on here on my works homepage. I have to add more projects (we just got new WEB pages) when I find time...

Prieni

Stefan, that's right. I just have put it again to show the difference between the original and pp'ed version as Aiki suggested.

Prieni