*tap*tap* Is this thing still on?

Hrm, looks a bit dusty in here.

Panametrics Epoch 2002 Owners Manual

Produced in the mid-1980's, the Epoch 2002 was one of the first models of digital Ultrasonic Flaw Detectors. Now owned by OlympusNDT, information on the early Panametrics products is hard to come by. This 112 page (4.3Mb) Epoch 2002 Operation Manual provides a comprehensive introduction to the unit as well as Ultrasonic NDT in general.

Orsha (Stanko) Surface Grinder Owners Manual

Also known as Rectifieuse Plane a Broche Horizontale a Chariot Croise et Table Rectangulaire. The 67 page (6.7Mb) manual covers, in French, operation and maintenance of 3701 and 3711 horizontal surface grinders, manufactured by Orsha and exported from the USSR into Canada by Stanko .

Unfortunately this scan isn't too good as it's taken from a copy of a copy.

Emco F1-CNC Instruction Manual

Many strange things have piled up on my desk over the years. I figured some of them might be useful to others out there so today I present 308 pages (9.3Mb) of instruction manual for the Emco F1-CNC desktop milling machine, in all its scanned goodness.

Other interesting things to follow...

Finally! Really big film with really wide lenses

I've been looking all over for a while now for a simple, but real, visual comparison of film formats vs. the image circle of a couple of really wide lenses. The examples you see in the Wikipedia and elsewhere tend to be hand drawn and assume lenses without inherent distortions (ie. a tree through a 210mm lens on 4x5 film).

Flipping through the Q4 1996 issue of Photo Technique International I spotted exactly what I've been looking for - this advert, by Schneider Kreuznach, has quite an extreme angle of view (some 120 degrees) combined with geometrically dramatic scenery. It really clearly illustrates the whole film diagonal and effective Angle of View relationship (notice the 6x9 vs. the 9x12/4x5 negative outlines) as well providing a canvas for playing with the possible effects of simple shift, rise and fall movements within the resulting huge image circle. As an added bonus it even shows off the vignetting present at the extreme edge of the actual image circle of the demonstrated 47mm f5.6 lens.

I've made one tiny alteration to the original advert - removing the scale reference that was relative to the size it was printed in the magazine. If you want to see the image circle and film sizes in 1:1 scale download a resized portion of the advert (~1.1Mb), print it at 200dpi and, voila!, a true to life version.

Now, go doodle the outline of a standard 35mm negative on the scene (effective size of 36mm x 24mm)... Doesn't it make you want to just run out and buy a large format camera?
:-)

An on screen cropping tool for Flickr-ers

If you've played with Flickr you'll have seen the 'notes' feature that allows viewers to mark-up areas of other peoples images. Similarly you've probably seen lots of great photos that were hiding there in plain sight just waiting to be pointed out. Accordingly, I present the elegantly simple tool BlockWindow.

Each time you start BlockWindow a black square will appear. Any corner or edge of the square can be grabbed to resize it and its surface can be right-clicked to toggle it between black and white, allow it to sink behind other windows or, most importantly, to make it go away.

Using BlockWindow to mock up a crop is simplicity itself - start four copies, ensure 'Always on Top' is selected on each and drag them over top of the subject image, overlapping them as required to isolate the area in question.

Most importantly, once you've got the perfect crop you can still interact with the Flickr window underneath to place the cropping note without needing to move all the BlockWindow instances thanks to that 'Always on Top' option.

Kudos to Scott Durow for authoring this handy little tool for me.

*tap*tap*?

Is this thing on?