By admin
http://www.cwhdallas.com/light-pen/
Light Pen
| Account limit of 2000 requests per hour exceeded. |
When your lights go dim, you may wonder what the problem is? Or, you may know? Either way, you have a lot to do. I'm going to share some survival tips for Power Outages, resulting from recent experience.
1. Locate light sources and keep them handy.
Light Sources include candles, flashlights, camp lanterns, and oil lamps. Most homes have a few of these items being used as 'decorator accessories'. Candles in glass jars are particularly appropriate for lighting during a power outage. In fact, I keep a few extra in the cupboard just for this purpose.
Oil lamps work well for overall lighting. These have a wide wick and offer a few degrees of warmth as well as light. By raising or lowering the wick you get more or less light. Adjust it for maximum light using the least wick for economic lighting.
Flashlights require batteries and should be used sparingly, unless you have an unending source of batteries. They are required for exterior lighting, when you leave the house. Candles won't work outside in the dark. Winds blow them out.
2. Locate heat sources and use them sparingly, but stay warm.
Alternate heat sources may not be readily available. However, by using good old fashioned common sense, you may be able to find heat sources that will work.
If your kitchen stove is not electric, it may be helpful. Newer gas stoves require electricity to light, if your stove is electric light, do NOT try to bypass the electric lighting mechanism.
All gas water heaters are a good source of warmth. Turn the hot water on to drizzle to keep pipes from freezing and allow the water to fill a wash pan in the sink, so that it can also 'drain' overflow. Warm water in the sink emits heat. Do this in all rooms with running water.
All gas cook stoves are a good source of heat. Bake cookies, prepare food in the oven, cook soups or stews on top of the stove and keep them cooking. The steam warms the air, and the heat keeps you warm. A warm bowl or cup of soup warms your body. Warm cookies are also heart and body warming. You can leave the oven on low to heat your home. DO NOT LEAVE YOUR OVEN UNATTENDED when leaving the door slightly open to emit heat.
If you happen to have a fireplace, it would be an awesome source of heat and cooking resources. You can prepare food in most fireplaces with a bit of ingenuity. Forks to cook meat, or a large cast iron pot or pan can be used in fireplace cooking.
3. Body heat and snuggling power work wonders.
Those old-fashioned activities are meant to keep you warm. Wrap up in blankets and snuggle on the couch with a good book. Read to your family members, or encourage them to read to you. Put on extra clothing, and bundle up as if you were going to be out in cold weather. (You are.) Pile on the extra blankets at night. Leave the hot water running but turn off all other heat at night, while you sleep. Occasionally get up and turn on the oven for an hour or so if necessary but NEVER leave it unattended.
Keep little kids warmer by putting them in with older kids or parents. Their bodies don't make as much heat as yours does, so take extra precautions to keep them warm. If you get wet, change immediately; wet bodies get cold faster. Stay dry and stay warmer.
Remember your Christmas stockings, all hung by the fireplace with care. This is an excellent way to dry clothing only NOT on the mantle. Hang your stockings, damp clothing, and other wet gear over the back of a chair 4 or 5 feet from the fireplace.
4. Resort to power free work sources.
This article was written first with a pen and paper by candle light. You can still work, even without a battery powered computer. Keep a spiral notebook handy for inspirations. Working pens are a plus.
Since you're going to write everything on a computer later, a rough outline by pen and paper is probably enough, with a few comments to pull it all together. Grammar, spelling, and other editing can be accomplished later on the computer.
Phones with hard lines that don't require power hookups are necessary to power outages. Have at least one on each line coming into your home.
You can probably charge your cell phone when you drive your car, although you may not be going anywhere. So, use it sparingly.
5. Check power sources to be certain cause of outages is not a repair issue.
Make sure lines on your property are not down, or burned. Visual inspections will verify this. Just check at connections outside to power meter, to connections, and fuse boxes. Check breakers to be certain they haven't flipped or kicks off.
Various causes of outages require an electrician to repair your services before you can restore power to your residence. During the recent storm ice and weight on the lines caused a burned connection before the meter. I lived with the outage for four days before I called in the local power company, because an electrician had thought it was inside my house.
Don't hesitate to call in an expert. Their help can be a time saver as well as a life saver.
Jan Verhoeff lives in southern Colorado where snow is not so much an annual event as a decade event. Recent storms and weather issues have given her insight to a different way of life. Power outages and emergency preparedness are becoming a necessity even in the USA. Business resources and the thrill of adventure are logged at http://lamarcolorado.blogspot.com some days are missing and some are downright silly, but the storm photos are there.
Mastering Shutter Speed in Low Light Situations
With today's enormous variety of fully-automated digital cameras it can often be difficult to capture low-light indoor and action photos that are pleasing and successful. For example, pictures from a recent indoor family gathering might be full of red-eyed friends and relations and clusters of people brilliantly over lit by the flash. So, how does a photographer avoid this?
It requires the consideration of a few factors and settings on the camera to overcome some of the typical challenges of low-light photography. The first things to consider are the automatic features on a digital camera. Today's cameras want to help people take pictures with as little photographic skill or knowledge as possible, but the settings at work in the automatic cameras are not always suitable to each situation. For instance, if someone sets their digital camera to one of its automatic functions, such as motion or sports imagery, the camera may work to adjust the aperture to get enough light into the camera's sensor, but it will also slow down the shutter speed, rendering the image blurry.
Luckily, many cameras allow their users to go to a fully manual mode, meaning the photographer can set the shutter speed, f-stop and ISO. What do these settings mean? For any discussion of low-light photography the shutter speed is basically the way of allowing the camera to capture the action clearly, meaning that it will have to be as fast as possible to catch the image, but also slow enough to allow in adequate lighting. This is helped by adjusting the f-stop, which is the setting on the lens that allows enough light to reach the sensor. Additionally the ISO, what used to be called “film speed” for traditional photography, can allow for faster shutter speeds, but introduces something called “noise” into an image.
Noise is basically defined as the ability to distinguish the dots or pixels that make up the photograph, which is an undesirable effect in photographs. Adjusting the ISO is usually not recommended, but no discussion of photography would be complete without the recommendation for experimentation with settings on a camera in order to determine the results. Unfortunately, most modern digital cameras also create “noise” in their images with slower shutter speeds as well.
So, how do you take a good low-light photograph? There are many things a photographer can do to capture images in low lighting and the first is to make adjustments to shutter speed to see if this helps. The next recommendation is to work with a tripod if possible to allow for reduced camera shake; try adjusting the aperture to allow as much light inside the camera, and finally experiment.
About the Author
When you need more information about digital photography visit: DPS!
How do I get ballpoint pen ink off of light color leather bag?
Try a Clorox disinfecting wipe! It cleans up sharpie permanent marker, so I am sure it could handle ink!
Wacom's Cintiq 21UX touch display gets ultra-sensitive pen
Wacom used the advent of CeBIT to roll out a refresh of its largest tablet display, the Cintiq 21UX. The 21-inch display revolves around a new stylus that provides much higher sensitivity: it can work at 2,048 different gradients (twice the previous best) and is sensitive enough that it can register input with only the slightest contact. Sketch artists and others that depend on line strength are ...
Thanks for visiting!
This entry was written by
admin, posted on
October 6, 2008 at 1:38 am, filed under
Vintage Computers and tagged
art,
design,
light,
light pen for pc,
light pendants,
light penetration,
light penetration in water,
light pens,
photoshop,
tutorials. Bookmark the
permalink. Follow any comments here with the
RSS feed for this post.
or leave a trackback:
Trackback URL.
