So it would take a $3500 camera body plus a $2000 lens to compete with an under-four hundred dollar Cyber-shot for the images I like the best.
$5500 plus tax for a Sony A7RIV, their new 61 megapixel camera body, and next month's debut from Sony of a new 200mm-600mm telephoto zoom lens.
The image would have to be zoomed on the desktop and then cropped. And only then, is my guess, would a comparison be possible with my Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX400V superzoom camera with its 20.4 megapixel sensor.
And that not's the only problem. That 600mm lens is a *pipe*. 2000 years ago cavemen could use it to club dinner.
That $5500 bundle is going to weigh a total of at least 2780 grams. That's over six pounds. Would probably break my tripod. Most of that weight is for that huge lens. 665 grams for the camera body and 2215 grams for the lens.
Meanwhile, the -400 with its integrated, unchangeable lens weighs in at a total of about 652 grams. Optical zoom up to 1200 mm with 200x digital zoom.
Still, that 61 megapixel camera would capture some *tremendous* detail in a each image. And image file size that would possibly be close to 50 megabytes, is my guess. 50 megabytes could be the size of only a single image. That's going to chew up a hard-drive really fast if you're an avid photographer.
On the R4 the limited touch-screen seems to be a nice addition but it's very limited, from what I've read, nothing really interesting, such as camera control. I don't take pictures of people, or other animals, so all the eye-detection hype is useless to me personally. What I would REALLY like to see is support for an infrared remote at the rear. At first I thought maybe that viewfinder sensor was detecting my infrared remote but it seems to be only from reflection onto the front sensor. On a tripod it's useful but without is cumbersome without three hands. The ISO range up to 32000 can be expanded to 102400, that's the same as the R2 and R3 but I have yet to find a lot of use for high ISO. I don't like the bluish color that creeps in. I might later try capturing images in a completely dark room at the highest ISO setting to illustrate this notion.
I have a Sony Alpha released 2015 and I have started to contemplate the coincidence that seems a synchronization associated with the purchase from my meager savings for that camera, trying to find other activities to break away from this daily grind at this same stupid desk.
If only I had that Alpha on 09/26/2013.
What's compelling about that incident in 2018, described below, is to consider my personal activities at the time. I've gone out there more often, trying to re-trace my steps back to those 878 days of the year 2004, but at that time in 2018, I had not been out there very often. It's 23 miles one-way for me and this desk is crippling me more every day I sit here trying to figure out what the hell happened. But in this instance, I went over there, looked around, captured a few images, came back, started reading a book, it made more work for me.
Now everything is more work for me. I can't go anywhere or do anything without finding signs of my Theory of Synchronization.
Aggravatingly, the buttons still don't work on my Alpha. I've worked around it somewhat with custom keys and to a limited degree with the infrared remote but it's still aggravating as hell. All I can guess it's moisture damage. The body is supposed to be resistant to moisture and mine has never been immersed in water so that really sucks. I was contemplating the possibility of purchasing the R3 but I knew that was highly unlikely to happen.
Yesterday I discovered the new Sony Alpha version and it's debut date.
During my brief foray into a photography forum on Facebook a while back I noted, using different words, that most people looking at an image aren't going to notice the difference of a $5000 camera image and a $300 camera image. From best I can tell with my amateur eye, most of the people claiming to be "professional" photographers are using filters and such to adjust their images. Phony images for phony people and their stupid iPhones.
And there is the fact that many of the social-media sites will downgrade the image resolution of a posted image.
That reminds me of my favorite illustration of the power my inexpensive superzoom camera.
I have always been annoyed by the sight lines in my apartment and that they built it on a graded downslope, something that wasn't obvious on Google when I was studying from Renton the overhead images of the construction site.
One day I walked to a distant location and used my superzoom camera to image my apartment from that distance.
I don't know the actual precise distance I was from my apartment when I captured the zoomed image, which is below here. According to the distance measuring tool of Google Maps, the distance was about 1000 feet. That's close to 3.5 football (USA) field lengths. But yet even from that distance, the detail captured by the optical zoom of my inexpensive little camera was impressive.
2017_Abbi_24-1200_DSC03600.jpg Kerry Burgess
2017_Abbi_24-1200_DSC03601.jpg Kerry Burgess
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DSC01504.jpg Kerry Burgess 2018
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Kerry Burgess, Jul 18, 2018 4:17am
This opening scene of "Roland" on the beach in "The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three" and the creature suddenly reminded me of a dream I had when I was last asleep.
There were several but I can now recall only the last vision I saw in my sleep before finally getting out of bed and coming in here to sit at this desk for almost every waking hour since then.
With never any personal injuries, I am left with the sense I was on some rickety ship. So that's consistent. The scene is also consistent with the initial "portal" scene of "Jake" in the 2017 film adaptation, which was not part of the book version.
The creature, I am now reading about this morning, all these hours later, made me think of the creature I saw in my sleeping dream.
I don't really know what was that creature. I can still sort of visualize it. There were other people, I knew somehow, and I somehow could hear in my mind, as though memories of another person talking and that I overheard. The point that is still clearest in my waking mind is that the creature suddenly appeared from a narrow board that was the deck of that rickety ship.
That other person seemed to state to some other person of her gratitude that I still had those hand grenades with me. Because I could see the box. The creature appeared and I saw, from my eyes, taking a hand grenade, pulling the pin, popping the lever, and dropping it down into the dark area below the deck where the creature was lurking.
DSCN4855.jpg, Kerry Burgess 07/21/2018 Coeur d'Alene
DSC05674.jpg, Kerry Burgess 07/21/2018 Coeur d'Alene
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Kerry Burgess, Jul 22, 2018 5:42am
June 2003.
The first time Ironman Coeur d'Alene was conducted.
I was competitor numbered 754.
I took two weeks vacation from my full-time employment at Microsoft Corporation in the Seattle suburbs.
The triathlon competition was Sunday June 29, 2003.
I drove my 2002 black Jeep Wrangler from my Seattle suburbs apartment in Issaquah ("On this ridiculous climb, With great tunnel vision, We built ourselves a mission") to the other side of the State of Washington and then just a few miles across the state line into Idaho and I stayed there in that hotel.
The first time Ironman Coeur d'Alene was held.
I remember that so well.
June 2003.
I took 2 weeks vacation and I drove across state and I stayed at that motel at Ironwood and Northwest in Coeur d'Alene.
Riding today my bicycle down Northwest Blvd towards the lake, the first time I have been through that specific section of road, which also part of the bicycle route of that triathlon, made me feel like I remember when I was a kid and I returned back to the town I grew up in and on leave after being deployed at sea for a long time.
And I think the feeling is the same. I don't want to know any of those people but this place is the closest to a place I think of as home as I can remember anywhere.
It's not. And it never will be. But still makes me think of what's missing. What I had been planning to do. I was going to make a home somewhere and this place is where I wanted to go. That just seems so impossible now.
Kerry Burgess, Jul 22, 2018 2:17am
Huh. Weirder and weirder.
I must be on the right trail, though.
Makes sense it would take some thinking to get this done and figured out.
Kerry Burgess, Jul 22, 2018 5:42am
Weirder too, Roland, is my beloved camera.
Yesterday, for no reason that's apparent, some buttons started not working. Had to use my small camera for the video I wanted to record of the lake waves with my best camera.
Click, click, click. They're duds. Buttons won't work.
Very aggravating.
My right hand has been hurting too for several weeks. I think it's my computer mouse, as this stupid desk is causing me a lot of physical pain.
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three
Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
—PROLOGUE:
THE SAILOR
The gunslinger came awake from a confused dream which seemed to consist of a single image: that of the Sailor in the Tarot deck from which the man in black had dealt (or purported to deal) the gunslinger's own moaning future.
He drowns, gunslinger, the man in black was saying, and no one throws out the line. The boy Jake.
But this was no nightmare. It was a good dream. It was good because he was the one drowning, and that meant he was not Roland at all but Jake, and he found this a relief because it would be far better to drown as Jake than to live as himself, a man who had, for a cold dream, betrayed a child who had trusted him.
Good, all right, I'll drown, he thought, listening to the roar of the sea. Let me drown. But this was not the sound of the open deeps; it was the grating sound of water with a throatful of stones. Was he the Sailor? If so, why was land so close? And, in fact, was he not on the land? It felt as if?
Freezing cold water doused his boots and ran up his legs to his crotch. His eyes flew open then, and what snapped him out of the dream wasn't his freezing balls, which had suddenly shrunk to what felt like the size of walnuts, nor even the horror to his right, but the thought of his guns … his guns, and even more important, his shells. Wet guns could be quickly disassembled, wiped dry, oiled, wiped dry again, oiled again, and reassembled; wet shells, like wet matches, might or might not ever be usable again.
The horror was a crawling thing which must have been cast up by a previous wave. It dragged a wet, gleaming body laboriously along the sand. It was about four feet long and about four yards to the right. It regarded Roland with bleak eyes on stalks. Its long serrated beak dropped open and it began to make a noise that was weirdly like human speech: plaintive, even desperate questions in an alien tongue. "Did-a-chick? Dum-a-chum? Dad-a-cham? Ded-a-check?"
The gunslinger had seen lobsters. This wasn't one, although lobsters were the only things he had ever seen which this creature even vaguely resembled. It didn't seem afraid of him at all. The gunslinger didn't know if it was dangerous or not. He didn't care about his own mental confusion - his temporary inability to remember where he was or how he had gotten there, if he had actually caught the man in black or if all that had only been a dream. He only knew he had to get away from the water before it could drown his shells.
He heard the grinding, swelling roar of water and looked from the creature (it had stopped and was holding up the claws with which it had been pulling itself along, looking absurdly like a boxer assuming his opening stance, which, Cort had taught them, was called The Honor Stance) to the incoming breaker with its curdle of foam.
It hears the wave, the gunslinger thought. Whatever it is, it's got ears. He tried to get up, but his legs, too numb to feel, buckled under him.
I'm still dreaming, he thought, but even in his current confused state this was a belief much too tempting to really be believed. He tried to get up again, almost made it, then fell back. The wave was breaking. There was no time again.
He had to settle for moving in much the same way the creature on his right seemed to move: he dug in with both hands and dragged his butt up the stony shingle, away from the wave.
He didn't progress enough to avoid the wave entirely, but he got far enough for his purposes. The wave buried nothing but his boots. It reached almost to his knees and then retreated. Perhaps the first one didn't go as far as I thought.
Perhaps?
There was a half-moon in the sky. A caul of mist covered it, but it shed enough light for him to see that the holsters were too dark. The guns, at least, had suffered a wetting. It was impossible to tell how bad it had been, or if either the shells currently in the cylinders or those in the crossed gunbelts had also been wetted. Before checking, he had to get away from the water. Had to?
"Dod-a-chock?" This was much closer. In his worry over the water he had forgotten the creature the water had cast up. He looked around and saw it was now only four feet away. Its claws were buried in the stone— and shell-littered sand of the shingle, pulling its body along. It lifted its meaty, serrated body, making it momentarily resemble a scorpion, but Roland could see no stinger at the end of its body.
Another grinding roar, this one much louder. The creature immediately stopped and raised its claws into its own peculiar version of the Honor Stance again.
This wave was bigger. Roland began to drag himself up the slope of the strand again, and when he put out his hands, the clawed creature moved with a speed of which its previous movements had not even hinted.
The gunslinger felt a bright flare of pain in his right hand, but there was no time to think about that now. He pushed with the heels of his soggy boots, clawed with his hands, and managed to get away from the wave.
"Did-a-chick?" the monstrosity enquired in its plaintive Won't you help me? Can't you see I am desperate? voice, and Roland saw the stumps of the first and second fingers of his right hand disappearing into the creature's jagged beak.
It lunged again and Roland lifted his dripping right hand just in time to save his remaining two fingers.
"Dum-a-chum? Dad-a-cham?"
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three
Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
PRISONER
CHAPTER 1
THE DOOR
part 3
When the gunslinger awoke again the sea was dark but there was faint light in the sky to the east. Morning was on its way. He sat up and waves of dizziness almost overcame him.
He bent his head and waited.
When the faintness had passed, he looked at his hand. It was infected, all right—a tell-tale red swelling that spread up the palm and to the wrist. It stopped there, but already he could see the faint beginnings of other red lines, which would lead eventually to his heart and kill him. He felt hot, feverish.
I need medicine, he thought. But there is no medicine here.
Had he come this far just to die, then? He would not. And if he were to die in spite of his determination, he would die on his way to the Tower.
How remarkable you are, gunslinger! the man in black tittered inside his head. How indomitable! How romantic in your stupid obsession!
DSC05691.jpg, Kerry Burgess 07/21/2018 Coeur d'Alene
DSCN4861.jpg, Kerry Burgess 07/21/2018 Coeur d'Alene
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three
Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
PRISONER
CHAPTER 1
THE DOOR
part 4
This door. This door where no door should be. It simply stood there on the gray strand twenty feet above the high tide line, seemingly as eternal as the sea itself, now casting the slanted shadow of its thickness toward the east as the sun westered.
Written upon it in black letters two-thirds of the way up, written in the high speech, were two words:
THE PRISONER
A demon has infested him. The name of the demon is HEROIN.
The gunslinger could hear a low droning noise. At first he thought it must be the wind or a sound in his own feverish head, but he became more and more convinced that the sound was the sound of motors … and that it was coming from behind the door.
Open it then. It's not locked. You know it's not locked.
Instead he tottered gracelessly to his feet and walked above the door and around to the other side.
There was no other side.
Only the dark gray strand, stretching back and back. Only the waves, the shells, the high-tide line, the marks of his own approach - bootprints and holes that had been made by his elbows. He looked again and his eyes widened a little. The door wasn't here, but its shadow was.
- posted by Kerry Burgess 1:18 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Wednesday 24 July 2019
