Just peruse the list of great works that Ancient Aliens proponents claim could not have been built by the people who built them. Do they make that claim about the Parthenon? No. Other than Stonehenge, it's all stuff built outside of Western Civilization.
It could be a series of coincidences, or it could be old strains of racist anthropology, briefly suppressed by Boasian Cultural Anthropology, finding a new conspiratorial outlet.
So Trump is racist therefore von Däniken is also? There’s plenty to criticize about ancient alien bozos, we don’t need to fabricate additional reasons to dislike them
Had a quick play with my iPhone 15. It doesn't give the sort of magnification you would need for insect close-ups. I will stick with my Nikon DSLR + 100mm macro lens!
Yeah it's far from being as good as a DLSR or mirrorless with a dedicated macro lens. Still, most people reading HN have one in their pocket and it can be a good test to see if you like the idea of macro. It does work with larger insects, on a pixel 10 pro my mantis fill most of the frame.
You can, depending on your definition of "useful". You can buy a cheap laser pointer, take out its lens, and put it over your camera lens. Tape it onto the lens for a temporary janky version or make a 3d-printed mount for something much better that you can easily take on/off.
I've personally found this little hack useful, but then again I don't have a DSLR and macro lens!
Macro photography is a fascinating hobby, revealing a whole new world under your nose. And you don't have to go any further than your garden or local park to go on safari.
It requires a bit of kit:
-digital camera (I use a Nikon D7000)
-macro lens (I use a Laowa 100mm). A standard lens won't be able to focus close enough.
-flash (I use a Godox). You need a decent flash to get enough light for a sharp photo. Ambient light won't cut it.
The main issue is that the depth of field (the area in front and behind the bit your are focussing on) is tiny. Usually well under a millimetre. Which makes focussing quite a challenge. Thankfully digital photos are effectively free and you can just delete the blurry ones.
It is also quite challenging to get close enough to insects to photograph (you need to be within a few mm).
There are plenty of good videos on YouTube to get you started, if you are interested.
Yes, you can use spacers. That is probably a good way to get started. I believe you can even use kits to put a standard lens on 'back to font'. I prefer a dedicated macro lens personally. Lenses like the Laowa 100mm for Nikon are fairly decent and not _that_ expensive (note it is manual focus - in macro you generally move the camera rather than changing the lens focus).
The "reversing ring" trick does work, (mounting a lens backwards) but the ergonomics are shit. I bought one to play with and tossed it in a drawer after only using it once. A real macro lens is so much better.
I picked up a binocular microscope a bit back and it’s one of my favorite nerd purchases - it’s 20x, which is enough to be interesting, but not enough to require a lot of sample prep, and the binocular setup gives you depth perception, so it feels like you’re “there” with whatever you’re looking at. I’ve mucked around with microscopes in the past, but the binocular is genuinely just fun.
I used to have a macro lens, and while I quite enjoyed it, I found that since I primarily do wildlife photography I could use a longer focal length telephoto lens at distance to get nearly as much detail by filling the frame with the subject. I have quite a few butterfly photos that were taken with a 300mm or 400mm telephoto prime, not a macro lens, and you'd be hard pressed to know the difference.
That's not true of /all/ macro photography, it depends on the specific details of the subject you're most interested in capturing. Without a macro lens you aren't going to capture the subtle textures of a butterflies wing, but you can certainly get a good photo of the entire butterfly including the textures of its eyes without a macro lens.
That said, I love doing proper macro photography. It does require a bit more kit though, you really need a ring light or a dual-flash, and a tripod and focus rail to support doing focus stacking to get extremely detailed shots. Agreed though with your sibling comment that manual focus is fine. There's really no reason to worry about refocusing on a subject once you get initial critical focus, it makes more sense to move the camera/yourself (which is the way a focus rail works).
It's strategic from a military perspective, not economic perspective.
Very little of anything actually goes on in Greenland. It has a population of less than 57,000 and a GDP of less than $5B. The US maintains significant military presence, including airbases, missile launch and intercept capabilities, and ensures the US controls the North Atlantic, instead of Russia.
Wasn't that just an act of spite because Europeans were the first to deliver commercial supersonic flight? I'm sure it will be reversed if the US becomes the leader.
I am guessing this is really aimed at the 1%, who don't have to get to the airport 3 hours before a flight.
Rory Sutherland commented that, insteading of spending billions on high speed trains, why not spend a few million on making the experience nicer. Better carriages, more staff, nicer stations.
If you're a member of the 1%, you can pay to use the private terminals and have a completely different airport experience while flying commercial.
This isn't a very common product in the US, but it is available at most big airports elsewhere.
I find it especially useful during arrivals. Typically there'll be a sedan to pick me up next to the plane, many airports will have co-ordinated with the airline, my luggage will have been loaded separately and the crew will make sure I'm the first off the plane. After exiting the aircraft, I'm driven to a private terminal for possible border formalities and there'll be a car waiting for me right outside with my luggage already loaded.
At some airports, you might save hours off a trip like this. Prices run between crazy at places like heathrow and a few hundred dollars at less fancy airports.
