What's everyone up to right now?

[Fireball]

Grieving for an America I think I tricked myself into believing was there in the first place.

Shell broken? Those people have been around forever. But they've had a chance to crawl from under their rocks and get their moment in the sun, with this round of the presidency. I'm hoping that the US looks around and tells them to get back under those rocks. We're not all like that, fortunately. I think it is about 10% of the population, with a lot of people who are just sheep and follow that 10%.

[SteelCurtain]

No, I just saw that the greatest Democracy in the world took a fucking shot to the nuts tonight.

[Little lunch]

Which democracy is that? England or Australia. :-)

[ignoramus]

India. Obviously.

[paulpablo]

Thinking do I deserve a KFC or not.

Looking at pop art tattoos online.

In work on a 12 hour shift.

[Longhorn]

Juuuust got done teaching two grown ass adults how to *properly* use a bong with the help of google... also smoking. Also watching a weird movie. Wish me luck?

[*Deidre*]

Relaxing, laying around today with a bad stomachache.

[Seraphina]

Just baked some brownies and getting ready to take kiddo and her friend to the pool.

-Teresa

[Alex K]

First day of vacation. I need a vacation.

[Anomalocaris]

First day of vacation. I need a vacation.

Soon you will need a vacation to relieve the stress of taking a vacation from a vacation.

---

Looking through my eclipse pictures using adobe photoshop.

This is my first attempt at eclipse photos, I took them on the cheap using no specialized equipment, just my Nikon D810 Digital SLR, 70-200 lens, 1/8000 shutter speed, f/22 aperture, and ISO 32, for filtering I used a 77mm B&W circular polarizer stacked on top of 2 cokin two stop gray filters, results turn out to be not that far from acceptable. But still over exposed enough not to allow any details of Solar surface.

I have a 500mm lens, but no appropriate filter that would fit its 95mm filter thread.

I learned a great way to take a picture of the sun with conventional digital SLR and lens without special equipment is to stack two polarizer oriented orthogonal to each other. The two polarizer together cuts out enough light to render an detailed image of the sun properly within attainable aperture, shutter speed and ISO sensitivity of any typical DSLR. What is more the polarizer allows you to adjust the amount of light to transmit. Unfortunately I didn't think of this ahead of time so didn't have 2 polarizer with me. You can get cheap polarizer for less than $20 mail order from B&H in Mew York.