2010-05-24

diy collapsible softbox

Not wanting to spend the money for a professional softbox I decided to go the diy route. I had a few criteria I wanted to meet. I wanted something large, portable, and the ability to use two flashes. I searched out a few other designs to get some ideas, particularly some designs from DIY Photography.net. For the size and shape I based it off this model. It is a 40"x24" face and about 20" deep. The idea would be to construct the box so it could fold into triangles. Initially I was thinking of using some sort of plastic, but in the end went with foam core and gaffers tape for the joints. Each "wall" was actually two pieces to fold into a smaller size. With some simple geometry I figured out the dimensions I need and started to cut the foam core. Once I had the pieces cut, it was time to tape them all together. The outside edge has a long strip of velcro to hold it together. The inside was painted flat white which helps bounce the light since foam core is quite translucent.

2010-05-13

New target of rights erosions: U.S. citizens

Glenn Greenwald wrote a great piece on the erosion of rights for U.S. citizens under the Obama Administration. This is a must read. Just like the Bush administration, the Obama admin is further eroding civil liberties. Except now the targets are US citizens who can be denied trial, citizenship, and even assassinated for acts of terror. What is an act of terror you ask? Well, it can be simply protesting at the RNC. Truth is terror is at the discretion of those making the charges. This is the beginning of a police state.

From the article:

"It is not hyperbole to observe that all of the above-cited recent examples are designed to formally exempt a certain class of American citizens -- those accused of being Terrorists and arrested on U.S. soil -- from the most basic legal protections. They're all intended, in the name of Scary Terrorists, to rewrite the core rules of our justice system in order to increase the already-vast detention powers of the U.S. Government and further minimize the remaining safeguards against abuse. The most disgraceful episodes in American history have been about exempting classes of Americans from core rights, and that is exactly what these recent, Terrorism-justified proposals do as well. Anyone who believes that these sorts of abusive powers will be exercised only in narrow and magnanimous ways should just read a little bit of history, or just look at what has happened with the always-expanding police powers vested in the name of the never-ending War on Drugs, the precursor to the never-ending War on Terrorism in so many ways."