Next up in our ‘Photos From’ collection is Corfu! Corfu was the first place I had ever taken my S9600 to so I simply stuck it on Auto and clicked away! I had the privilege of going to Corfu for 5 days in 2007 and do you know what the best part was? - I didn’t pay for any of it! I was sent there for a conference meaning my college pays for the flight and accommodation - possibly the cheapest holiday I’ve ever been on! The hotel was without doubt the most amazing hotel I’ve ever stayed in. I say hotel but it’s more aptly described as a palace. It deserves 6 stars it was that good - every morning there was a huge buffet breakfast of fruit juices, cheeses, bread, eggs, hams, fresh vegetables, the works. And there was another buffet in the evening! I learned a whole two words while I was there: Kalimera (Good morning) and Kalispera (Good Evening), very useful for meeting and greeting. I had fantastic weather for the five days and the accomodation was excellent - everyone had their own little apartment / villa type house; not just a dank room, but a proper living space with a balcony overlooking Kommeno Bay. Corfu Village was just 12km away and could be reached easily by bus - it’s a very touristy village, but nice anyway. I took a boat trip around the north coast - nothing on the coast but hotel after hotel after hotel, it’s crazy! The competition must be immense.
I’ve got about 600 or so photos from Corfu so I’ll likely do a Part 2 to this short collection.
Photos From London
Photos From Paris
Photos From Berlin
Technorati Tags: Corfu, S9600, Kommeno Bay, photography
I remember long ago finding a great java applet online that allowed you to view any website as a huge entanglement of colour coded nodes, representing every type of tag in your HTML source code, connected to each other to give a visual layout at what your source code looks like. Finding it again has eluded me for a long time but I finally found it today and I’m rather chuffed with myself! The HTML DOM Visualizer is a great way to see how well layed out your website is, how many of each tag you employ in you sites design, and it’s really just a very novel idea - I’ve never seen any other similar program. I wonder if there’s a way to deduce how search engine friendly a website is just by looking at its DOM graph - any ideas?… anyone?…. hello?….
Here is what each colour in the chart means:
grey: any other tags
As a perfect example, here’s how this site looks when passed through the script:
To see the applet in action check out how the graph for projectVISUAL evolves.
I’ve just posted a new high speed video on YouTube of a grinding wheel doing some serious business to a metal rod (well not too serious). I’ll be posting it here soon aswell. If you want to keep track of all the videos I shoot without checking back here then you can subscribe to my YouTube Channel.
Technorati Tags: grinding wheel video
Third in the series of my random city photo postings is from Berlin! - dating back to March 2008. I seriously just had to get away from Ireland for a few days as college was getting crazy, so when I heard the college German Society were planning a cheap trip away I jumped immediately on board (despite the fact I knew exactly zero people there). Now I’m not one to turn my nose up at a free meal - the holiday and the people were fantastic, but in hindsight we didn’t pick exceptionally well timed dates to travel - the weather was also great but the S-Bahn and bus systems were on strike! For the single week that we were there for! To rub salt into the wounds there was an S-Bahn station directly outside our hostel and the nearest U-Bahn was a nearly 30 minute walk away:( We hung out mostly near the Reichstage and passed the River Spree when getting from out hostel to the U-Bah station. I you go to Berlin make sure to check out the Hauptbahnhof (Main Train Station) - it’s like a mini town! Other places to check out are any KDV (huge shopping centres; someone correct me please if that abbreviation is wrong) and also the fanstatic backery Kamps. Now on to the photos - in no particular order…
I started to get serious about this blog beginning in July 2008 and as part of my commitment I knew that I needed to build up some backlinks to promote the site. So over the past 6 weeks I’ve been visiting relevant forums, replying to interesting topics, and generally leaving my signature all over the place. Trading links is a bit more tricky so I’ll leave that for the moment. According to backlinkwatch.com, as of August 11th there are 296 backlinks to my site floating about - so far so good. Then I come across this ‘U comment I follow’ movement crap where I find out that some of these backlink that budding bloggers rely on may well be worth squat! Don’t get the wrong idea - ‘U comment I follow’ is a good thing - but the fact that it’s not the status quo is just nuts!
Let’s back up a little here; typically bloggers like to leave comments to other bloggers posting, a) because they’re interested in the topic, and b) because they can often leave a link back to their own website, thus generating some potential residual traffic. These backlinks also help boost a sites Google PageRank (does anything else matter these days??) since Google partly rates a websites importance based on the number of links back to that site. Sounds great! - leave an interesting comment on a blog you like and get a backlink to your site! Turns out that could be bullshit.
Some sites, Wordpress springs to mind, when posting your comment will add a particular attribute to the ‘rel’ tag in the generated HTML. The ‘rel’ tag tells your browser what to do with a link (your precious backlink in this case) when it’s pressed e.g. ‘rel = external’ tells your browser to open the link in a new window. Wuppee. So what particular attribute am I talking about? I’m talking about ‘rel = nofollow’. If ‘nofollow’ is included within the rel tag (Wordpress includes it by default and there’s no Wordpress option to turn it off) then when Google crawls this backlink, it sees ‘nofollow’ in the tag and excludes the link from being counted as an actual backlink to your site! - NUTS! This nofollow crap was supposed to reduced spam comments (it doesn’t) and so it’s just hurting people from promoting their sites and connecting to each other.
I’ve become paranoid now about posting comments on blogs - I check its source code and head directly to the comments section, checking to see if nofollow is lurking about. I shouldn’t though; posting comments isn’t solely about generating more backlinks, but it’s a nice bonus!
There is hope though - for Wordpress users there are plenty of plugins available that will strip the nofollow attribute from the HTML before it is posted, allowing your readers to post their comments knowing that they can promote their own site while contributing to your own. I’m using a plugin by Kimmo Suominen that’s easy to install and does the job well. Randa Clay has created some nice de facto official dofollow badges that one can put on their site declaring that it is nofollow free - see below this post? That’s one there!
I thought every linked post I made was a backlink to help promote this site - guess not. It’s great though to be aware about this now and to know that so many people are changing their HTML to get rid of this vestigal piece of code.
Technorati Tags: u comment i follow, dofollow, commenting
HDR photography has become quite popular in recent years. Some people like the over the top trippy acid looking results one can get with Photomatix (although Photomatix isn’t limited to this), while others prefer the greater flexibility and reputed more realistic results that can be got from Photoshop. To help yourself, and myself, see how weblogs approach HDR I’ve put together a list of 22 tutorials / guides that explain the process, from the basic drag and drop approaches to the more complicated post-processes one can do following tonemapping. Some of these guides you may have seen before, others are less popular, but they all offer something new for everyone.
1. Vanilla Days
This is a very popular HDR tutorial and compares the capabilities of Photoshop against Photomatix, concluding that Photomatix gives more control over the final image. It explains the essentials - auto-bracketing, merging and tone mapping. What makes this tutorial stand out from others is that is explains in good detail the tone mapping options available in Photomatix and provides results for different Photomatix settings. It also makes a lot of comparisons: using 1 RAW versus 3 RAWS, using jpgs instead of RAWS and direct comparisons between Photoshop and Photomatix. If you’re interested in creating HDRs this tutorials should definitely be in your bookmarks.
2. PopPhoto
This post, by Jack Howard, is a whopping 11 pages long and explains pretty much everything you need to know about putting together HDRs. With such depth you expect to gleam some nuggets of information - I knew Photomatix had exposure blending capabilities but I didn’t realise how limited they actually were until I read this. Like before, Photomatix and Photoshop are compared and the strengths and weaknesses of both are listed; quite useful if you’re in two minds over which one to buy. At the end of this tutorial there is a useful tips page listing a methodology for producing the best HDRs possible.
3. BackingWinds
Backing Winds is a blog maintained by Ryan McGinnis. He shows us how to create realistic looking HDRs using Photoshop - and definitely a guy whose against the ‘misuse’ that often occurs when creating HDRs with Photomatix (see a post of mine for an example!). His post is a great resource for anyone interested in using Photoshop, simply because it’s such a huge package and is less accessible than Photomatix - it’s very easy to be overwhelmed by Photoshops 19000 options! Ryan also give some pointer on adding those crucial finishing touches using Histogram and curve adjustments - very useful!
4. GrindGod
GrindGod has a very well layout guide, starting from the top with telling us the equipment we need to get started before getting into more detail with the various options that Photomatix provides. One flaw with this guide however is that there are no images describing the steps or showing any HDR examples.
5. CameraLabs
CameraLabs is a forum and this is simply a post on it, but it’s one heck of a post! The interesting thing about this post is that it was the guys first attempt, and it’s a very good one! There are pictures to go with every step also so it’s very easy to follow. The actual settings are shown so you have some benchmark settings that should work reasonably well to start with. This is a great tutorial for novices; however because it’s a posting on a forum there’s no guarantee that it will remain there long term - sometimes forum topics or posts can be removed either by the administration or the poster so if you find this guide useful it would be worthwhile saving it to your computer.
6. The 23x Blog
Another good tutorial, it has nothing new over the five previous ones but hey, it’s good to check out it’s work if HDR is your passion! It does have some great results - I love the photo of the boats (right) that is shown on the site. Right now I dream of being able to make a photo this good! It gives some essential tips such as using the same aperture for each shot - a lot of other tutorials seem to overlook this point. The author also has a link to their Flickr page where you can see more images.
7. Popsci
This guide has over 1500 Diggs since May 2007 so has proven very popular. It first describes what exactly a HDR image is, before showing us the differently exposed thumbnails that will be used for the final image. It then describes the two main programs used to create the HDR: Photoshop and Photomatix before describing a little what tone mapping is and finally comparing the original photo to the final tone mapped image. It also comments on an open source alternative, Qtpfsgui, available on Windows, MAC OSX and Linux.
8. Digital Camera Resource Page
This is another guide posting on a forum. It highlights the problem many people will have if they are creating HDR images from multiple RAW files - aligning of the source files. According to the guide Photomatix cannot align wide angle shots very well and so it recommends using a program called PTGui. It will warp and align each picture to match up perfectly with each other - handy if you don’t have a tripod nearby! The guide is quite detailed - it provides the original under- metered and over-exposed images, it provides the settings used to create the HDR and explains how the settings in Photomatix affect the final results - a good tutorial to check out.
9. Cambridge In Colour
Cambridge In Colour explains why increasing the dynamic range of your photography is a good thing, when and where the technique should be applied as well as some of the trade off that you will encounter by taking the HDR approach. Many people (myself included) treat HDR-esque post-processing as a black box; images go into Photomatix, HDR comes out followed by tone mapping. Cambridge In Colour delves behind the scenes and explains very well the mechanisms of HDR - well worth the read if you want to sound all knowledgeable on the topic :).
10. NatureScapes
This isn’t so much a traditional guide as it is a book on the topic! You can download a 49 page pdf of this guide; well worth having saved to disk. It covers every aspect you could ask for: What is HDR?, Setting Up Input Images, Processing a Single Frame HDR Image and Processing Multiple Frame HDR Images. The HTML version also provides a gallery of very good HDR images towards the end that’s worth checking out. By the way the book is free so you’ve really got no excuse not to check it out!
11. PhotoShop Support
This is an advanced tutorial in Photoshop - for those of use used to the black box approach of Photomatix, be prepared for a challenge! The main focus of this tutorial is overcoming the problem of combining images in which subjects in the images have moved between different exposures. This is achieved using smart objects. There’s quite a bit of manual work involved (oh No!) but it gives you more flexibility in the long run when you are post-processing your hard days shots.
12. Duane Storey
A quick tutorial with a great subject (see right) this guide uses Photomatix to create a great scene of the Vancouver skyline. Five images were used to make the final image and from what I can gather from the guide, the HDR was made using jpg images - very impressive!.
13. Abduzeedo
Abduzeedo uses a simple subject to get a very color rich final result. There are plenty of illustrations to go with this tutorial as well so there’s no way you’ll get lost while using it. It’s also the first guide I’ve seen where a HDR was made from a compact camera, showing that high end DSLR’s are not essential for getting good results.
14. Thoughts From My Life
Thoughts from my life uses an interesting subject and Photoshops Merge To HDR options. Any photos taken indoors that have windows in them usually suffer from overexposure of whatever can be seen through the window - Thoughts From My Life shows how HDR can overcome this problem.
15. WebDesign Library
Here’s yet another site that uses Photoshop to create the HDR image from three differently exposed RAW pictures, followed by tone mapping in Photomatix to jazz up the final shot.
16. Easy HDR
EasyHDR is a piece of software I just came across while writing this post. I haven’t used it so can’t say much but the website gives a very comprehensive guide to all its functions and the illustrations of
HDRed photos look very impressive.
17. Slager Man Photo
Slager Man Photo shows the difference between the histogram of a regular picture and that of a HDR, something I’ve not seen anywhere else. They also have a link to a small gallery at the bottom of the guide of some seriously wacky looking sunsets!
18. Visual Photo Guide
This guide is quick and to the point - no padding. Some settings for your camera are recommended and how to set them on a Nikon D50 (the camera used for this tutorial) is explained. There’s also a link to a HDR video tutorial.
19. Picture Correct
Picture Correct throws together a little personal story to go with their guide - a nice touch. It uses only two images - one overexposed and one underexposed to get really good results. Layer masks are used as one choice to blend the photos so if you enjoy working with them then this guide is for you.
20. Grumpy Editors Guide To HDR
Every site I’ve listed so far has assumed that you are either using a windows or a mac machine, but what if you use Linux instead? Well then this tutorial is for you: it mentions OpenEXR, PFScalibration and Qtpfsgui as Linux HDR solutions. Tone mapping is then achieved with Qpfstmo (I’ve no idea why such strange names are used, if they give results then that all that matters.)
21. Digital Photography School
Digial Photography School is a very popular photography site and for many is the first choice of all photo related information on the internet. This guide is a guest post from Pixelens.com. It talks about the essentials, and compares Photomatix to less known programs (to me at least) such as the Photoshop plugin ReDynaMix. It also compares the difference in using different number of exposures and how much of a difference there is between using a single RAW and multiple RAWS.
22. Stuck In Customs
Stuck In Customs is a site by Tray Ratcliff, home to some of the most amazing HDR photographs I’ve ever seen. Seriously his work is world class and is the standard everyone should aspire to. From what I’ve seen he deals mostly with the surreal HDR look rather than the realistic look but you should check out his work to really see what can be done if you know how. It’s likely you’ve seen his work on plenty other sites - any list of “Amazing HDR Photographs” will likely contain more than one of his works.
After looking through these guides I feel rather humbled by my own efforts. I guess the saying is true - the more you know about a topic the more you realise how little you know.
Technorati Tags: HDR, photography, Photomatix, Photoshop, tonemapping, auto-bracketing, RAW, Qtpfsgui, PTGui
Following yesterday from the pictures of Paris, I’ve put together a few more; this time from London. I was visiting a friend for a couple of days and like always I was carrying my S9600 about. The trip wasn’t specifically photography oriented so the opportunities to get some decent shots were few and far between. We did get to the Tower Bridge and get into the Natural History Museum, but it sucked. My favorites from below is of the pigeon - it landed just as I was walking past. I only got to take the one picture below - the S9600 writes RAW files to the Compact Flash card very slowly and by the time the camera was ready to take another the pigeon had taken flight - damn! My other favorite is the second image - I like the contrasting feeling between the dark sky and calmness of the bench. I think I’ll continue with this “Photos From” theme, next up: Germany!
My sister was recently in Paris and took my camera to take photos of some old documents she wanted to have digital copies of. She also took some shots around Paris since I’m always interested in getting new pictures from as many different countries as possible. I’ve never been to Paris apart from Charles de Gaulle so having someone else do the work for me was the next best thing! I ran them through Photomatix from the RAW file to touch them up a bit, some areas of a couple of them are washed out but I don’t think it affected any of them too much. Each photo below is a link to a 1200×900 larger image, help yourself to any you like but if you’re using them on your website a mention back to this site would be nice! I’ve posted seven here that I particularly like - though apart from the Eiffel Tower I don’t know the landmark names - any ideas?
This post is a quick follow up to my post on which single exposure range is best for making HDR-esque photographs. Rather than using a single exposure range (e.g. ±1, or ±2, or ±3), most people will use multiple exposure ranges to capture the entire range of lights and darks in a scene. Using multiple exposures seems the most sensible route to take anyway - heading out with your camera and taking one metered photo along with a single under- and over-exposed image may limit your post processing possibilities, so it’s best to take as many as reasonably possible. Note I didn’t take multiple shots of the photo below - I didn’t even take the photo! The different exposure are simply from adjusting the exposure levels in photoshop and saving as TIFFS. I really have to begin using auto-bracketing!
1. HDR Of The Metered Photo and ±1, ±2 Exposures
If you’ve seen the first post then you know how the metered photo and ±2 EV looks. Using ±1 and ±2 exposures gives more detail in the clouds, they almost look painted on, but the building looks slightly more washed out. Also the lighting across the building is pretty uneven for some reason. There is however more detail in the ripples of the water.
2. HDR Of The Metered Photo and ±1, ±2, ±3 Exposures
The lighting across the building is slightly more even, however some areas of the sky are becoming washed out due to the very overexposed area of the +3 exposure. This is something to be careful when using overexposed images - there’s no need to go so overexposed the entire image is washed out. Thumbs of the different exposures can be seen in the first post - in retrospect the ±3 and ±4 exposures are probably too under- and over exposed.
3. HDR Of The Metered Photo and ±1, ±2, ±3, ±4 Exposures
I don’t like this result, plain and simple - too many areas are washed out and there is nothing in it that improves over earlier efforts. There’s nothing more to say on it.
Related Articles:
Tutorial To Create A High Dynamic Range Photo (HDR) From A Single RAW Image.
Creating Ultra Vibrant Tone-Mapped Surreal HDR Photos With Photomatix Pro
What Is The Best Exposure Range For HDR Photos? Part I
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