ATTRACTING- Improving Digital Images With HDR & Tone Mapping

I was recently underwhelmed by the standard photographs I was able to produce on a hiking trip to Drakensberg Mountains in South Africa. The difficulty is the haze, the contrast and the need to take wide angle photos to capture the majesty and size of the mountains.

I find this process very interesting and take a lot of HDRs because I'm not yet sure what's possible.

Some might not like the effect in the last photograph as they could feel its not real like the second one is. In that case you should focus on the HDR and use only touches of tone mapping.

You might be interested to know a bit more about High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography and tone mapping - I would suggest you just google it or visit the www.stuckincommons.com site of Trey Ratcliff who is acknowledged by many pros as one of the more knowledgeable people on HDR.

ANTISOCIAL - Spam on Social Networks, The Storage of Worthless Data

Looking for some information about relaxation music from tweets I searched on #relaxation and was confronted by a pile of repeated tweets linking to an ebay seller, naturesoundcds.

clipped on 07/12/2010 by digivuza

This user has 9,371 tweets with nothing to suggest any are different to those I looked at, ie all are linked to the same URL that links to naturesoundcds on ebay which sells CDs.

Others twitterers including

soundsofocean with 7,772 tweets and http://tiny.ly/55Ql linking to naturalsoundscds

calmingnature with 384 tweets and http://tiny.ly/Xsgz linking to naturalsoundscds

naturecdstore with 10,718 tweets and http://tiny.ly/rj4k linking to naturalsoundscds

naturesoundscds with 24,580 tweets and http://tiny.ly/Rs0j, http://tiny.ly/o9Nt, http://tiny.ly/YqbO, http://tiny.ly/o9Nt all linking to naturalsoundscds

appear to be set up solely to promote sales of these CDs.


Searching the previous 10 hour's posts (up tp around 09:00 on 7/12/2010) for #relaxation, yielded 257 tweets linking to naturalsoundscds and only 52 other tweets.

To me this is completely unacceptable and reduces the value of twitter and is therefore an antisocial activity.

However, and more worrying is that it just adds to my conviction that the INTERNET is probably the most wasteful emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world. All this (and plenty more junk like it) useless and never to be looked at again data is stored with backup on server farms around the world emitting CO2 without benefitting anyone or anything!

AMAZING - Keeping This Up For Ten Years - Time Lapse of Child

ARTISTIC - Wikimedia Commons Photographs Available For Use By Everyone!

This beautiful photograph of a Sikh pilgrim at the Golden Temple (Harmandir Sahib) in Amritsar, is available online (click the image to link) for anyone to use

from: Wikimedia Commons
(click image for full story online)

photo by Paulrudd
(Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported)

ASTONISHING - Biotech Hackers?

This is really astonishing, if one draws a parallel between the Mainframe Computer Industry of the 70s and hackers Gates, Jobs and Wozniak, then these guys are about to bring biotech to the people!

from: NATURE
(click image for full story online)

I remember CAPEX meeting at our Biosciences unit, where Food Technologists and Engineers goggled at the vast costs of the complex machinery the Biotechnologists convinced us where non negotiable. While I dig into this a bit futher why not help me with your comments and inputs - email me here.

ANNOYING - What Bugs Me is The Lack of Attention to Detail and Quality

Coming back from overseas, from stepping off the plane to getting half way back to Pretoria, I saw two serious issues that indicate a lack of attention!

The first:

photo by Digivu
(Creative Commons Some Limitations License)

I suspect this reflects the absence of FIFA, to keep civil servants on their toes - they revert to not worrying. Alongside the very good posters for South Africa's UNESCO Heritage Sites we use valuable advertising space to misinform tourists!

photo by Engineering News

Then on the beautiful already completed 4 lane freeway (down to barriers, road markings, cat's eyes and street lights) the 80km/h signs are left standing on the 11 km from Pomona Road - no one has thought to take them down and give the hassled motorists some relief!