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It’s not the contents of the clipboard, it’s the current selection. That’s a good feature when you want to reply to a specific part of an email, but if (like Jamis) you don’t even understand what it’s doing, it’s a right pain in the ass.

Re: Lens Steps

Embracing the constraints of a fixed depth prime lens is one of the best creative decisions a photographer can make. Like many tastes, zoom vs. prime preferences swing like a pendulum. Right now every camera supports zoom, even if it’s crappy digital magnification, and I think that it encourages mediocrity.

Zoom lenses look their best when used in the middle of their range; however, most inexperienced hands will consistantly focus them at their widest or longest depth depending on their distance from the subject matter. Convenient, sure.. but a recipe for ho-hum two dimensional shots.

Prime photography gives you the tools to make your shots look amazing by pulling your subject out and allowing the background to really be in the background. The “constraint” of 50mm (I prefer 35mm) quickly becomes a sweet spot, as you instinctively know how a photo will be framed without having to spend as much time looking through the viewfinder.

I predict that prime lenses are going to come back in a big way.

You gotta love that beside Nikki’s photo on Brave Space Design is the phrase, “High resolution press images are available upon request.”

Um, yes please.

There are other effects from a zoom besides just making everything bigger. Narrower depth of field, reducing the convergence of non parallel lines (I’m sure there’s a scientific term for this), etc.

“i wonder if we’re gonna be seeing more and more of this pale blue on the web” Too funny. I just changed my app to blue. About an hour before you posted this. Different shade however.

That baby blue… it is everywhere. And even MS seems to have adopted a slightly more aggravatingly bright version of it for Office 2007 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Microsoft_Office_OneNote_2007.png)

There’s something wrong about using a baby blue Excel and having a rainbow of formatting colours sitting in the top default toolbar…

It’s not really very important because the quote from Haas remains true. But for the record – zoom vs. prime lenses dont really effect depth of field, thats controled by appature size. Example a 70-200mm f2.8 lens has a shallower DOF than a 300mm f4 prime lens. Likewise, an 18-200 zoom will have the same angle of view at 50mm as a 50mm prime will. Point being: any lens in the hands of a good photographer is going to work, and a lazy photographer can make any lens bad.

just sayin’

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Those draft guys are astonishing.

WhatTheFont doesn’t know that draft font.

Anyone else know?

good news

Just a further clarification on DoF, it is also affected by focal length and distance from subject, not just aperture.

I read some time ago that most award-winning photos are taken with a normal lens (e.g. 50mm for 35mm film). Not sure if that’s true or an urban legend but it makes some sense because isn’t a normal focal length the closest to the human field of view?

I own that shirt. Makes people laugh all the time. :-)

The DRAFT stuff is fantastic. It reminds me of an exhibition I saw in Copenhagen a few years back about Japanese design. RE DESIGN I think it was. (UPPERCASE seems to be big out East.)

A number of Japanese designers were asked to redesign various everyday objects from toilet rolls to tea bags. The results are beautiful; imbued with that Japanese sense of purity and simplicity and laden with the differences that make the culture so intriguing to Western eyes. (Just check out the redesigned bowling score cards featuring up-skirt shots of women to help spice up a ‘boring’, mostly male past-time. Actually, maybe that’s not so culturally different.) A quick search turned up this site with some examples. A catalogue-cum-book accompanied the exhibition. If you’re willing to take a chance on the recommendation of a total stranger, this is a beautiful book and well worth £8 ($16) of anyone’s money for a secondhand copy. It’s all in Japanese, mind, so you loose the commentary and rationale behind each solution from the exhibition, but the exquisite photography and inspiring redesigns speak for themselves.