champu

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content

    5,692

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Feedback

    0%

Everything posted by champu

  1. champu
    They're also doing a really cool charity event in a couple weeks in New Jersey. A skills camp at Crosskeys to raise money for children's special programs at a local school, and demos, presentations, Q&A time, etc. with the kids there. Kelly from Realxstream is putting it together for her students and knew she could count on the PD team, they are good people.
  2. champu
    Yes. And as someone mentioned already, the effect is more noticeable the darker the scene gets. I don't have an off-shoe cord yet, so I can't show you what a rotation does on a wall, but what you can do is shoot with a wide lens and the flash manually zoomed all the way in and see an oval shape of light in the frame. Now, if your flash is zoomed to a conservatively short focal length (at the expense of wasting light outside the frame) and/or you're not right on top of the subject, you probably won't notice a difference because in skydiving the background is so far away and unaffected by the flash anyway. But if you're shooting unique angles and getting artsy with your framing (i.e. getting away from, "subject in the center, 10% margin on all sides of the frame" kind of shots) you'll have dark areas on your subject near the left and right edges of the frame.
  3. champu
    That was my general thinking, but then again if a company like Cookie Composites can design a box specifically for one model of video camera... As I said, if I can't find anything, I've got a solution that should work reasonably well and not require elaborate machining. Although it wouldn't provide the same protection that a D-box would.
  4. champu
    Remember that as well if you ever see people not taking seatbelts in jump planes seriously. In the words of Jamie Hyneman, "Unfortunately, human beings are big heavy things."
  5. champu
    The major players seem to ignore this market, probably for lack of interest, but I was wondering if there were any companies out there that offer any kind of stock solution to the flash mounting problem. Most flash brackets/mounts I've seen are either custom built/machined one-off, or they are somewhat dodgy. The end goal is to come up with something that can hold a 580EX while flattened and in a landscape orientation and snap into a stroboframe 300-QRC. I also want to be able to get the flash on/off the bracket without tools so it can be used for ground shooting. I already have an idea of how to build one myself that will work well, but I'm just weighing how long it's going to take vs. how much it would cost to buy one COTS if they already exist.
  6. champu
    When you're jumping at Elsinore, Perris, or Eloy, it's important to realize that while at first it may appear there are many good places to land all over the place, as you get closer to the ground you'll realize there's a lot more (and larger) dirt clods, shrubs, burrows, and bushes than you originally thought. Looking where you want to go, not where you want to avoid is as important as ever. And always remember to determine where you can land first, and then as a subset of that, determine where you want to land, not the other way around. Tickle is a good guy, glad he was able to help you out. He's got a lot of energy and puts it into chasing down jumpers and malfunctions.
  7. champu
    The internet, considering the transport layer and down, is just a channel. If you can communicate securely over a wireless channel, then you can communicate securely over TCP/IP. Improving security on the internet isn't a matter of tearing it up and rewiring things, it may just be a matter of realizing the world wide web, specifically, is not the greatest place to perform certain types of communication. /edited: than/then
  8. champu
    Unfortunately, the parser in this forum's software kills html special characters, so no further (more clever) interpretation was possible. I was being a smart-ass, but I do agree with what I think was your original point. Correcting someone's spelling of a proper name that didn't originate in the language in question is pretty silly. I'd equate it to complaints about someone misspelling an onomatopoeia.
  9. champu
    Wouldn't it be... دادغب
  10. champu
    Still a violation unless the person you bought it from doesn't maintain any copies (which I doubt is the case.) But that's not going to get the RIAA all up in arms. Just like the RIAA didn't really do anything when it took half an hour to encode an mp3, very few people had broadband internet connections, and trading meant putzing around on ratio ftp servers. It has been going on for a long time, and the RIAA is just afraid of how convienient it has become.
  11. champu
    Mom: "What ever happened to honoring your mother and your father!?!" Son: "Yeah... uh... That was actually the point with which I had the biggest disagreement..."
  12. champu
    I feel as though I can discuss almost any topic with a level head. Most of the times that I feel driven to post something it's because I partially agree with something someone wrote, but I feel that their representation of "our side" isn't particularly becoming, or I think they're mixing up some good general ideas with specifics that get it all wrong. I'm a fan of, "toning it down," because it's hard to think and yell at the same time. Also, I'm not an expert at everything. No one is. I don't understand how people can get so very worked up over such a wide range of things, as though they actually know what the hell they're talking about in regards to all those topics.
  13. champu
    Unfortunately, by the time the samaritan thought to start running the video, the student was already screaming at the officers that they dare not touch him, and was proceeding to go off about the evils of the patriot act. Then all you see is the backs of a bunch of people crowding around and yelling at the police demanding their badge numbers. Said simply, I don't want to see people get roughed up by a law enforcement officer with a chip on his or her shoulder, but at the same time, what constitutes a civil rights violation is a function of the officer's action in response to a situation, not how aghast onlookers happened to be, or how vocally the person speaks out against legislation they disagree with in the middle of the encounter. In the absence of evidence one way or the other regarding the former, people here seem to be focusing on the latter.
  14. champu
    As Jan mentioned, "More stuff" around your control system can be problematic if not designed and packed properly. This would certainly make me adverse to having after-market secondary riser covers added, even with a master rigger being the one to do it. Also, hangups of one or both risers during deployment can cause off heading and hard openings. Do you stow both sets of risers all while sitting on one side of your rig? (I do.) It's easy to not quite stow the two sides the same when you do it this way, and if the design isn't sufficiently immune to this, you can cause problems.
  15. champu
    That may have been it...
  16. champu
    If someone asks you to see your ID when you're at a computer terminal in a library and you turn around and say, "What? Cause I'm brown? Is that what this is about?" Then whether or not it actually was about race becomes rather hard to determine doesn't it? This whole quibble sounds sideways to me. They ask him to leave but then grab him and hit him with a taser? He refuses to leave, states that he's bipolar, lays down for fear of what he might do, but then starts asking people to join his resistance? Sorry, I don't buy either side's story.
  17. champu
    GOOD! Hope it stays that way. I'd debate that too, but stop short of arguing. If we are going to get literal, to satisfy the fall in freefall, I'd say there has to be falling, not floating. Well, it's also not called the USPA for nothing.
  18. champu

    HC7

    champu replied to fabiana's topic in Photography and Video

    In that I have no doubt. It does appear the problems I'm having with my HC5 are (at least mostly) due to shutter speed issues. The manual shutter speed setting that allows you to run at 1/60s is an HC7 only option. I was looking for a workaround on the HC5 to perhaps use its built-in modes to "trick" the camera into giving me what I want.
  19. champu

    HC7

    champu replied to fabiana's topic in Photography and Video

    I definitely follow you on the rolling shutter artifacts I'm seeing in the video, so I have a few questions about settings on the HC5 to try and get rid of this problem. It doesn't give you direct access to shutter speed, instead it just has a dummy or "semi-auto" SCENE_SELECT function ("Are you at the beach on a sunny day?", "Is someone blowing out their birthday candles?", "Are you shooting video of the pretty fireworks?", etc.) What combination of this function and perhaps the AUTOSLW_SHTR function do you think will yield best results? Also, with the 0.5x from royal-lens, what combination of STEADYSHOT and CONV_LENS settings would you recommend? Thank you much for all your help.
  20. champu
    Having seen a Sabre2 opening that involved an uncolapsed sail slider and the resulting ambulance ride, I wouldn't recommend jumping one wtih a mesh slider.
  21. champu
    If having a license is supposed to demonstrate a certain level of experience, and "experience is what you get when you don't get what you want," I think we should remove the, "planned and executed a successful whatever-way" requirement from licenses. I think instead you should have to have been on 10 dives where the plan went drastically wrong.
  22. champu
    Being fed up with a perceived lack of credibility in one entity will often drive people to listen to their opponents with an undue vigor. Politicians love this and make use of the response constantly. When everyone is covered in a dried layer of dirt from all the mudslinging fights gone by, the latest rounds are just comical.
  23. champu
    Handful of gravel? You were lucky!
  24. champu
    In general, contrasting ideas are good for the world. Thankfully these folks are providing them without physically attacking anyone. That said, it is a bit nauseating to hear children parrot any idea that they probably don't understand.
  25. champu

    HC7

    champu replied to fabiana's topic in Photography and Video

    Hey Iwan... I also looked at the video from my HC5 on my TV at home, and confirmed what we saw on the screen on Sunday. There appears to be horizontal light and dark waves that kinda roll through the image during footage shot while sitflying. It's definitely irritating, but it seems fairly minor. The 4-way FS video I shot looks fine, and the head-down video looks fine as well. My camera was completely bare, top mounted on an FF2, and attached with a cork-pad stroboframe that I'm not particularly happy with. I'd like to try again with the 300-VID plate (which I can modify to make it so I can get to the battery release latch and then attach very securely to the camera) and maybe a camera condom of some sort. Does anyone know if camera condoms for the HC5/7 are available anywhere yet? I'm very impressed by the image quality of this camera. Very impressed. I'm not giving up on this without a fight /edited to ask: How bad was Jason's footage while sitflying anyway? I didn't see it.