SharpE TD6R5
Not much time for photography lately,
so I will write something about the new SharpE version which we just released yesterday.
It took way longer than expected to get this release done, but I’m very happy with how it turned out. The changelog is bigger than ever before and there are so many new features that I can’t mention them all in a single blog post.
However the most important new feature which I want to point out is the explorer desktop. Mathias found a way how to activate the original explorer desktop while all other parts of the explorer shell are disabled. So we spend the last days implementing this feature and making it work properly on all windows versions. Now we are really happy to announce that with the new SharpE version the explorer desktop is available on all supported windows version from XP to Windows 7 both on 32 and 64bit. Of course my old SharpDesk desktop is still available, but now the user can chose which one to use.
Besides this and all the other crazy changes my new skin is also included in this release 
The complete changelog, download link and more details can be found here
Last but not least a screenshot how the desktop on my laptop looks like now.
SharpE TD6R5
Winter in Black and White
Last week the impossible happened. It had snowed for several days and the temperatures stayed low enough for the snow to not instantly melt away (like in the last years). And then it became even more crazy, on tuesday the clouds went away and the sun came out
So I decided to take a day off from work to go hiking through the nearby woods. I took the train to Rothenstein (first station by train to Saalfeld) and from there I just started walking through the small valleys and forests nearby. Of course the route I walked was way longer than expected and when I returned to Rothenstein after 6 hours (already at dawn) I missed the train back by a few minutes. So after walking home to Jena I was back from my “little” field trip after 7 hours.
It was a really interestig experience exploring the forest in such a sunny winter weather. Still lots of snow everywhere and the sun shining down from the deep blue sky. I of course took pictures like a maniac and have now nearly finnished sorting out and processing them. Very surprisingly I ended up converting lots of the pictures to black and white. This is something which I have only rarely done before and I really didn’t expect the pictures to end up that good at all.
Without any more words here are some selected winter pictures in black and white
(color pictures will follow next week)
High Seat
The Old Oak Tree
Magic Forest
Nuclear Energy – Yes or No?
Some amazing images posted over at NikonGear made me think about nuclear energy and the safety aspect of it. The question as usual is if nuclear energy is safe and secure, if we can really control it or if it is something that we should abandon as quickly as possible.
How high are the risks of a meltdown? How else to generate so much electrity? Is there even enough uranium to fuel all the power plants? Is there another alternative which produces that much energy without damaging the environment? What about human errors in a power plant? What about all the jobs which are currently in the nuclear industry? Are corporations trying to play down accidents? [...] [...] [...]
The questions are endless and as a single person it is impossible to answer them all. No matter which argument is brought up, there is always a counter argument from either side (yes or no). This means that objectivity is not given in pretty much every discussion about the future of nuclear energy. That’s why I want to try viewing this from a different point of view. From a point of view that is based on facts about what can happen…
History has shown us that accidents happen in nuclear power plants regularly. May it be a pipe bursting and leaking small amounts of radioactive water into nature, may it be a power plant being operated without working safety shutdown because of a technical error or may it be a partial or full ractor core meltdown. All this has happened before and will at some point happen again. Maybe not in your country, maybe not even close – but somewhere it can happen.
The question now simply is
What does it mean when something goes seriously wrong?
and Can we even risk a small chance (no matter how small it is) of it happening?
To answer both questions one has to understand what radiation is and what it does to humans.
Nuclear radiation is invisible and depending on the kind of radiation penetrates almost everything (Gamma Radiation). Only several cm or even meter thick concrete and heavy materials can to some extend block or at least attenuate it. The problem that makes it so dangerous is that at the one hand it penetrates almost everything, so you can’t fully protect yourself against it – and on the other hand it can interact with other atoms and molecules on an atomic level. This means that getting in contact with nuclear radiation isn’t immediately noticeable (unless it’s a really crazy dose). It will go right through a wall, food, cars or humans. But on it’s path it will interact with other atoms and molecules changing their structure and basically breaking them. That makes it very hard to handle and often impossible to treat completely because you have no way of knowing which molecules get altered in what way.
The second problem of nuclear radiation is that already small amounts of a nuclear material will for a long time (hunreads and thousands of years) produce high amounts of radiation, affecting everything around it. So what happens now if something goes wrong in a huge nuclear source like a power plant?
What will happen is known since 26 April 1986 – the Chernobyl accident, when a russian nuclear reactor experienced a full meltdown.
The question now is not to ask why it happened or if it can happen again, but rather to ask
what is the influence of this single accident on nature and humanity?
The result of the accident was a plume of highly radioactive fallout which was sent into the atmosphere and which spread over an extensive geographical area. By this single accident four hundred times more fallout was released than had been by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. As a result of this over 330,000 people had to be evacuated permanently and about 800,000 people suffered from radiation exposure. It is unknown to day how many people really died because of the aftermath of this accident from cancer or other related diseases. But I think it’s safe to estimate those numbers to be a lot higher than the few thousands who died because of the accident officially.
What remains to be the most forgotton aspect of the aftermath is that a huge area from one day to another got uninhabitable for hundreads of years. A complete city and everything around it emptied, hundreads of thousands people had to leave – never to return.
What remains are ruins – ruins which should stand as a reminder…
How the ruins which are left look like is shown in few photographs which have been taken since the accidents (One can get permission to enter the contaminated zone). One photographer who went there just recently on two expeditions is Arkadiusz Podniesinski. He brought back some amazing pictures and even video documentation about what is left of this once populated area.
Take a look at his photographs here:
Chernobyl 1st expedition
Chernobyl 2nd expedition
The second link contains also two high quality videos, the second (and shorter) video I want to embedd here:
Chernobyl slidedshow [ENG version] from Arkadiusz Podniesinski on Vimeo.
Can we allow this to happen again? Even with only the smallest chance?
No!
Sources:
[1] Residual Risk – An Account of Events in Nuclear Power Plants Since the Chernobyl Accident in 1986, 2007 (G. Kastchiev, W. Kromp, S. Kurth, D. Lochbaum, E. Lyman, M. Sailer, M. Schneider)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
[3] Uranium Resources and Nuclear Energy 2006 (Background paper, Energy Watch Group)
[4] Arkadiusz Podniesinski
New Blog Theme
Just a quick update on the blog. As you might see the theme and colors have changed to something more friendly. I wanted something not so dark and more friendly but also not absolutely white. So I installed a new theme named “Grey Matter”.
The down site of course is that the formatting in the older posts is a little bit messed up (but not too serious). But the whole text and image formatting hasn’t been so great anyway – so I will try to make it better in the future
Big Splash in a Glass
Splash
Before heading back to Jena I had another chance to play around with the previously posted glass and water drop setup.
Since it was requested by several persons I took a photo of the setup this time. The picture is attached at the bottom and is pretty much the same a described before. As you can see there it’s very simple after all.
Since I was already taking pictures of single water drops the next idea of course was to create some bigger splashs covering the entire glass. My previous method of just having a bottle with a hole in it to produce the drops of course won’t work, not even when the hole is made bigger.
Mixing
So I simply used a long metal tube by filling some water in while keeping the other end closed. It took some time to get the timing between releasing the water and taking the picture right.
But it worked out pretty well with some practice and after setting everything under water several times.
The biggest problem with this of course is that every shot you take sets the entire setup pretty much under water. The background will be covered with water and there will be little drops all over the glass. So the really annoying thing about this is that you have to clean the glass and background between every single picture.
In the end it was still worth the work since the pictures turned out really amazing!
Setup
In: High Speed, Photography