Aww so cute,

Dwarves are not extremely small in Tolkien.

And Thorin was exceptionally tall, if I remember correctly.

Yes. 5′2″ apparently, at least for movie purposes.

He’s had to wear lifts.

Because he has to be taller than Graham McTavish playing Dwalin, who is an inch taller than Richard Armitage.

Richard Armitage is 6′2″, while Gramam McTavish is 6′3″.

Dwarves are normally supposed to be four to four and a half feet tall, Hobbits two to four. So not necessarily that different in height, at least at the extremely.

But the proportions are all different.

Hobbits are supposed to be Little People.

Dwarves are something else altogether.

I think their heads should be different.

Comparatively bigger.

The films don't always get it right.

Although I must say they do a fairly good job in many cases,

Elrond and Saruman are the worst.

Certainly I wish that Elrond were otherwise.

It is hard to make the heads bigger.

They have made everything else bigger, you know.

You can do ears, nose, but you cannot do eyes. Easily.

I probably shouldn’t tell you the tricks if you don’t already know them. Better not to spoil the illusion at first.

Of course I know.

All common sense.

Oh, ok. Well, they all have prosthetic hands and fat suits.

Evidently, yes.

It also serves to make Bilbo look different from them.

And embiggened feet.

Well, that’s a bug, what so it goes.

Hobbit feet are not supposed to be disproportionately large.

His feet are much bigger than his head.

In fact, if anything, they would be smaller: cube law.

Dwarven feet.

Oh, that.

Yes.

Looks very real.

They’ve worked at it.

The lighting looks off.

It is the standard moonlight thing of using blue.

Hell on white balance.

Of course, moonlight is the same color as sunlight, which it is.

The people seem to have more contrast than the background.

And there is too little colour variation in the background.

Compared to the people.

That’s a standard trick to make you pay attention to them, not to the background.

.0

It just doesn't look very realistic, but, then again, what does it matter?

It is like how Ansel Adams would burn in the edges, creating a vignette look.

With digital photography, you drop the sharpening, saturation, contrast, and brightness of the background if you want to draw attention to the people in the foreground.

I do that with my “flower portraits” all the time. Sometimes with people, but I don’t shoot many people.

But it's risky if you do with in a situation where people know the background will be fake.

Hm, yes, maybe. I don’t use fake backgrounds.

I just don’t want a busy background drawing attention from the subject.

That sort of thing.

Hm, I seem to be a diagonal guy.

And top-left to bottom-right, too.

The blue in the second one is actually some piece of trash metal, discarded pipe or sheeting or something like that. I just found the color contrast with the foliage and berry irresistible.

Plus the line matches.

Of course, you have to stand in just the right place for that.

Orange–blue is a basic opposition. So is green–magenta:

That one I did not do that same sort of thing with. The forest pulls you away from the deer.

Nice.

I don't think you need to blur the background btw.

I don't think it adds anything.

In which one? I didn’t with the deer.

The flowers.

I didn’t blur it.

I just didn’t sharpen it.

What do you mean?

Sharpening a blurred background is no use anyway.

It is a long lens at a wide aperture taken very close-up. That always gives you very thin depth-of-field.

Ah OK.

So you shot it like that on purpose.

This was digital capture on a Bayer sensor.

Yes.

So you “need” some sharpening to overcome the digital-capture artifact. I withheld such from the stuff I wasn’t interested in. Dulls it up a bit.

You are unlikely to be able to tell at that size. Maybe.

It's just that only one or two petals are sharp.

The blue one that works out well on; the magenta one, not so much.

Those are respectively flax (Linum) and shooting star (Dodecatheon).

If you look at these, I feel — and I may be wrong — that most of the better shots have narrow depth of field.

If you click on the aperture link at the bottom, it sorts them by aperture, which is one of the things you use for depth of field. The ones at the end have the most.

You’d think the Focus Distance sort would be better at that, but for some reason, some of them have the wrong distance recorded. Dunno why.

I don't see much difference to be honest.

98.245.80.27/photos/Crested-Butte-2011-07/Large/…

The first one and the last ones appear equally blurred.

The backgrounds, that is.

That one that you linked to above is taken with a wide-ish lens. It’s 35mm. But still only at f/4, which is a reasonably wide aperture. Notice that there is a lot in that shot. I was happy to get the bee frozen at ¹⁄₄₀₀₀s. That was pure luck.

It was taken from just over a foot away: Nikon Focus Distance 0.35 m. The thing to remember is that that includes the distance from the sensor to the front of the lens, not just from the front of the lens all the way to the thing focused on.

What do you mean the first one and the last ones? Which view? The main index?

I didn’t play any games with blurring there; it is just how it happens when you focus so close.

That’s a 35mm camera frame, so has rather narrow depth of field compared to anything you are probably more used to.

I don’t mean to presume, of course.

I’ve been told that shooting stars’ Latin genus is one of the few that we have that were so named by the Romans themselves. I haven’t verified that.

I sorted the images by aperture, as instructed, and this image ended up around the upper left corner.

Ah ok.

Let me look at that view.

The flower you posted above was in the lower right corner.

Yes, it isn’t really a perfect way. You have to take focal distance into account as well. The closer you focus, the less you can see.

This is how your own eye works, you know.

Try it with your finger by your face.

Focus on your finger, and the stuff behind it is blurred.

People forget this because they are constantly changing what they are looking at, and seldom focus so closely, with nothing else.

It isn't the focal distance so much as the distance between you and the object.

Because, the closer you focus your lens, the more you will see nearby, and the less further off.

Er well, ok. I was calling focal distance the distance between you and the object. Focal length is a technical term related to optics, and that might be what you are thinking of.

A longer lens has a greater focal length than a wider one has, irrespective of what you are focusing on.

So you don't see "less" if you decrease focal distance; what you mean is probably that the absolute range in which you see things sharp decreases.

@Cerberus I don’t know that I have ever thought of it that way before.

@Cerberus That is correct.

Well, it is true, obviously.

The hyperfocal distance is something photographers get a bit too enthusiastic about.

Do they?

I feel they do, yes.

Because it is not necessarily the important thing about how you perceive a picture.

It all depends...

The Large view has hyperfocal distances in meters.

(Do you know of a way to suspend a process in such a way that it (temporarily) releases its hotkeys?)

In fact, everything is in SI. I only convert altitude to feet for the general-purpose view.

@Cerberus I am not quite sure what you mean by hotkey there.

(When I just suspend it in my process manager, the hotkeys don't work any more, but they aren't released either.)

What does "release" mean?

A key-combination, like alt-left.

REALLY!?

Release means let any other programs use the hotkeys.

thinks

I am not sure the concept maps to my world. Aren’t you talking about which program receives keyboard input?

That is, which has the "focus"?

Normally, shift-control-right is used to select a word to the right in a text box. But I have this program that insists on claiming that hotkey for changing my screen orientation to vertical.

@tchrist Yes, probably.

Yes, I hate that.

So my only option seems to be to contextually disable or freeze this program.

But launching the .exe takes too long for my taste.

And disabling the process doesn't release focus, apparently.

I don’t know enough about how Microsoft’s GUI does things to answer that question.

Yeah, it is probably not possible, not in an easy way.

Anything I could come up with would only make sense in a Mac and/or Unix environment.

Yeah.

I'll try to find a different program.

But focus-theft is one of my big peeves with Windows, and even the Mac at times. We are very anal about it with Unix.

Surely there are other ways to rotate the screen.

Yeah, focus theft really sucks.

Flash is so evil!

Because we type so much. So if something steals our focus, it screws things up as the input goes to the wrong program.

If I click a Flash element in a web page, the press control-w to close the tab, it doesn't work.

It is so mean.

I have had to create a script to automatically click on the address bar, of all places, to circumvent this.

But it takes too long, so I have it enabled contextually, i.e. only on certain websites.

So Flash steals the Close Window event?

Well, the Control-W event.

Which is a pain to configure, as you will imagine.

It steals focus from all other elements in Firefox.

Google does this. I want them to die.

And in Chrome too, I believe.

Google does what?

I have regular, lowercase letters bound to certain browser-navigation things, like forward or back, or next form (tab), etc. Even for zooming or unzooming.

But if you go to Google, even when the focus is not on a textbox, it steals focus and events and interprets it as though you had typed it into the textbox that does not have focus, so I can no longer use keyboard shortcuts for navigation. I hate them.

So if I type "x" to go forward or "z" to go back, the damn thing puts it in the textbox instead no matter where my focus is.

Even worse, I cannot navigate the list of links it gives me that way.

Normally I use "s" to go to the next link, then RETURN to chase it. When I am done, I use "z" to go back, then "s" to go to the next link, or "sss" for three more etc, and then RETURN to chase that one. I never have to use my mouse.

It steals my text keys when I am not focused on the text box. This is wicked, evil, stupid, and wrong.

If I wanted to type into the text box, I would give it focus.

Google presumes you have no other reason to use the keyboard. They are idiots.

The letters chosen, by the way, are not abbreviations. They are just in convenient places for touch-typists.

At least in vi, the letters actually mean something.

Flash is forbidden at work.

So how does this work on sites that don't mess with your settings?

How does the browser know that you're not in a text box?

Hm, sorting on Depth of Field works a bit better. training.perl.com/photos/Crested-Butte-2011-07/index-DOF.html

@Cerberus That is a fair question, and I have a fair answer.

Consider what happens when you have more than one text box.

The browser always knows which one has the focus, so that it can direct your keystrokes to that box, not to the others. Right?

@tchrist I prefer the sharper photos.

I’m not sure which are "sharper".

@tchrist Yes, but the problem is that I cannot interact with the browser's focus, so I can't use its knowledge, except through Javascript maybe.

The address bar is a text box that sometimes has focus.

In fact, I have something set up to cycle through all the text boxes.

All?

Can you be 100 % sure?

Because I can't.

How would I miss one?

I mean in the current page.

A web page is a linear sequence of text.

I have this Greasemonkey script that is supposed to work only outside of text boxes, but I have needed to add various exceptions.

Some of that text is a special code that indicates an enterable text box.

How about a text box in a Flash element?

Therefore, you always know all the textboxes, and their order.

Or one added dynamically?

If the browser knows it is a textbox, then that suffices.

Not for my scripts...

If it does not know it is a textbox, I am sure there are other problems.

Hm.

It may be that you are using something different from what I am using.

If my browser knows this, which it probably does, it will not let me tap into its knowledge,

How can an different program get this information from the browser?

How can a Javascript inside the browser get this information dynamically?

It would be great if it could.

I actually have it set up to cycle through all the hot things. Each time I hit tab, it goes to the next focus-able thingie. Like from here, if I hit tab, it goes to the send button, then to the upload button, then to the help, faq, legal, privacy policy, mobile links, then to the search textbox, then back here.

Isn't that the case by default?

But if I am on a Google search, it is not.

It may be.

Let me check.

Works for me.

That is, tab cycles focus through all clickable elements.

But it is true that Gmail does steal certain keys even outside the text boxes.

Ok, the thing that is special is the Single-key shortcuts at the very bottom of this page.

That is not on by default, but I find it useful.

So I need to press control-f to search the page, instead of just starting to type, as on nearly all other pages,

Hm.

Is that because you have it set up that starting to type means to do a search?

Ah OK, so you use a built-in function of the browser.

But those won't work in Flash, not in Firefox.

@tchrist Yes.

I am used to always hitting Cmd-F to do that.

I use regular keys for those other things.

What if you want to close a tab while your cursor is in a text box?

Or go to the previous page?

Many website automatically focus on a text box upon loading.

Cmd-W closes the tab.

Which is convenient.

@tchrist But then you can't use your single-key.

Cmd-LeftArrow goes back.

So you use two different commands?

Right, because I am in typing mode, so I cannot use "z" to go back, I have to use Cmd-LeftArrow.

A single-key one, and a double-key one?

No, actually I usually use something totally different.

And you need to consider every time whether you are in a text box or not?

I am either in keyboard mode or mouse mode, mentally.

So am I.