Tilt and shift lenses offer tremendous creative possibilities for users of digital SLR and mirrorless cameras. This practical book explains the techniques that will help you take better photos - photos that don't distort or lose focus. Assessing the benefits and pitfalls of a range of lenses, adapters, software and editing techniques, it guides you through the practicalities of working with these lenses and gives you the skills to use them to best effect. With stunning examples throughout, this book gives an overview of the different lenses available, and tips on how adapters can give tilt/shift options when using old medium-format lenses. It gives advice on how simple lens shift can change the entire look of your photos, and techniques for using lens tilt for focus control and close-up working. Stunning examples show the use of tilt and shift lenses across a range of available focal lengths, both tripod-mounted and handheld.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 23rd International Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing, LCPC 2010, held in Houston, TX, USA, in October 2010. The 18 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 47 submissions. The scope of the workshop spans foundational results and practical experience, and targets all classes of parallel platforms including concurrent, multithreaded, multicore, accelerated, multiprocessor, and cluster systems

In 1974 a message was beamed towards the stars by the giant Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, a brief blast of radio waves designed to alert extraterrestrial civilisations to our existence. Of course, we don't know if such civilisations really exist. For the past six decades a small cadre of researchers have been on a quest to find out, as part of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So far, SETI has found no evidence of extraterrestrial life, but with more than a hundred billion stars in our Galaxy alone to search, the odds of quick success are stacked against us. The silence from the stars is prompting some researchers to transmit more messages into space, in an effort to provoke a response from any civilisations out there that might otherwise be staying quiet. However, the act of transmitting raises troubling questions about the process of contact. In The Contact Paradox, author Keith Cooper looks at how far SETI has come since its modest beginnings, and where it is going, by speaking to the leading names in the field and beyond. SETI forces us to confront our nature in a way that we seldom have before - where did we come from, where are we going, and who are we in the cosmic context of things? This book considers the assumptions that we make in our search for extraterrestrial life, and explores how those assumptions can teach us about ourselves.

The quest to find a theory of quantum gravity that could potentially explain everything. Nearly 60 years ago, Nobel Prize-winners Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson stumbled across a mysterious hiss of faint radio static that was interfering with their observations. They had found the key to unravelling the story of the Big Bang and the origin of our universe. That signal was the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the earliest light in the universe, released 379,000 years after the Big Bang. It contains secrets about what happened during the very first tiny increments of time, which had consequences that have rippled throughout cosmic history, leading to the universe of stars and galaxies that we live in today. This is the enthralling story of the quest to understand the CMB radiation and what it can tell us of the origins of time and space, from bubble universes to a cyclical cosmos - and possibly leading to the elusive theory of quantum gravity itself.