Artsy Fartsy Friends, Practical High Dynamic Range Use

Friends are good. Not only to hang with, etc, but sometimes in other ways you may not expect. Like expanding your horizons.

And in these troubling times sometimes we need our horizons expanded, especially caught up in our 'normal' lives as they were.

I've been taking photos for a long time, but taking pictures and taking great pictures are two different things.

I have a couple friends who are real artists.

One is a photographer who has a great eye for framing a photo, and she also has a knack for catching a shot perfectly in a way pleasing to the eye.

My other friend (coincidentally both of them are Canadians, though one lives close-by while the other one still lives in Canada) is also a true artist. He can paint and draw, and even sculpt, and he also has a good eye for photography. And the interesting thing is that he's also a "computer person".

Such a popular misconception that people who are technically-minded can't be artistic.

I have another acquaintance who's also an artist of sorts. He's been a long-time customer of mine, and though his paintings and drawing and sometimes photography is of a, er, specialized nature - he too is a true artist.

I've never thought of myself as an artistic-sort of person, despite being a person who designs webpages and photography. My first priority is to get the information onto the page in an eye-pleasing way, easily organized and aesthetic - but I don't think of it as particularly artistic. Sometimes anything real inspired comes secondarily. And I find myself always struggling with the artistic part.

Sometimes I have to come back to an idea four or five times to generate something different and interesting, or I may go do something else for a day until I come up with a good design. Sometimes even longer.

But lately I've found, because of the influence of my more artistic friends; I've actually been able to improve my own creative process and look at things with an imaginative and quite different eye.

Instead of taking a photo with the object framed perfectly, light directly on it; now I take a few shots from different angles and maybe with different lighting behind it. And not always the object itself as the sole focus of the photo. Or maybe I take a photo that catches my eye now, when it wouldn't have before.

And I've found that the more I look at things with an artistic (yes, I have to use that word one more time) eye the more and easier I can see things in a new way that I wouldn't have before.

My mother was something of an artistic soul. She'd always been interested in painting and drawing, though her primary interest was sewing.

She could probably have benefited from more painting and drawing lessons but she never had as much time to put into it, having worked all her life as a seamstress.

Her real artistry was in sewing. Anything and everything and in any way a person asked, and she could always suggest a better and maybe more visually appealing way to do something.

That's what artistry is all about, right?



Another of my hobbies has paid off, at least in a small way.

If you're interested in photography you probably know what a High Dynamic Range photo is.

If not, here's my thumbnail explanation from my HDR website - "HDR photography consists of the same scene taken with differing exposures; commonly using the auto-bracketing exposure functions of most good digital cameras. These photos are combined with specialized software to get the best possible results and are then normally processed with exposure blending and tonal (tone) mapping functions."

Some old-time (and new-time) photographers don't like the photos created this way.

There's many different ways to go about it. You'll see a number of different examples on my small website. Some are very, very much processed; some not so much (like the two near the bottom, where it says "more conventional" and the one beside it). These just bring out the landscape under the trees which normally would be very much in shadow with a default or automatic exposure. The rest of the photos are much more and less realistically processed.

Basically you are bringing out the things that a photo taken with a film or digital camera aren't going to show you, due to their inability to do more then one exposure. Say you're standing outside a cave in the bright sunlight and taking a photo pointing toward the mouth of the cave. If you pick an exposure adjusted to the inside of the cave you can see into the interior of the cave in the photo, but everything else is washed out. If your exposure is set for the bright daylight, the mouth of the cave is dark as night.

With a few separate photos taken with various exposures you can use the HDR software to combine these into a photo that will show a pic which would allow you to see the entire scene.

It's an interesting hobby, and has many creative uses as well as more practical ones.

But up until now I hadn't had an opportunity to use one in my work. Recently a local judge running for re-election asked me to do a website for him, and I was able to incorporate one of the heavily processed photos into his website as the top of the banner on each page.

Nothing major, but it looks pretty good, maybe in a stylized way and better then the same photo (of Watertown from Thompson Park) in a more conventional form.

It's something to keep in mind as I continue to create websites and consider various forms of HDR's I can incorporate into them.

Blogs, Friends, Clayton Car Show, the Environment, Indian River Conservancy trail, more Canon A570 IS, Scribefire Addon for Firefox

Blogs

I just can't see myself blogging and analyzing every strange bowel movement every single day of my life {SARCASM}.

I mean - I haven't actually seen the above chronicled but I'm sure multiple people have done so on numerous occasions. Gawk!

I've recently been enjoying using Flickr.com (as mentioned in an earlier entry) and some people do the same with pics. They have this 365 day thing. Kinda interesting, but along the same lines.

I guess to the student of psychology (or biology - if the above were the case); as well as the occasional odd stalker, delving that deeply into a stranger's (or a friend's) life would be of a certain fascination.

But I'm going to try to keep mine a bit more impersonal and more technically-oriented if possible. The entries won't be as often but I'd rather spare you the in-depth and likely excruciatingly boring details of any weird bodily function incongruities and such.


Friends/Clayton Auto Show/The Environment

The Clayton Car Show. Lots of cars, and people. BTW, the photo at left is just an amusing one I took - an Adirondack chair and table built on top of the bed cover of a classic truck.

Despite trying to be more environmentally conscious nowadays I still love the big musclecars and the old cars. They're part of our heritage, part of what made America great as well as a little piece of what still makes America great, as well as the human species.

I miss my hotrod (at right - '79 Olds Cutlass Salon, '77 403 Olds Rocket, etc etc - I won't bore you with the numerous details and money and work I put into it - great car, miss it every time I get into my Lumina), but on the other hand at this point in my life I'd rather have something more fuel efficient. Yet there are days I see a particularly nice older vehicle and yearn for something more then my Lumina Euro. A nice piece of engineering that's also fun and powerful is something that I can appreciate.

Yea, Human Ingenuity - both on a large scale (mass-invention and mass-production of the autos and auto evolution over a short period of human history) as well with the ability of individuals to improve on something that thousands have worked at creating. And despite environmental issues we all have to have the occasional thing that we enjoy in life.

That's one of the things that environmentalists and those with agendas forget - that we need to find a happy medium ground. That life is too short to live in mud huts and skimp and scrap for each erg of electricity. There needs to be a happy medium.

And of course; in the Clayton area - I saw a lot of another extreme. Lots of people with signs that say "No Wind Turbines" etc. I live near large power lines and a radio tower - I WISH for a nice big wind turbine. No EM fields, clean and productive, a good meshing of technology with the environment. And a nice comforting white noise sound. Unfortunately some birds and bats also blast themselves all over them. (Photo at right from the Maple Ridge Wind Farm, Lowville, NY - more of my photos of the wind farm at Flickr.)

I read somewhere that if we had taken all the money spent on the Iraq war we could have added some sort of alternative energy sources for every home in the US. What a waste that we have to put so much money into destruction.

I also saw an old friend there yesterday; a guy I'd been best friends with for many years when I was younger. We picked up girls together, wasted days, had fun, drove around a lot, etc. The type of thing when you do when you're younger and have less obligations.

Over the last decade I've seen him about as many times as I can count on one hand. Human relationships are funny - I still consider him a friend but if we now ended up spending time with each other every day we'd probably find that we are significantly different now. I noticed the differences in us right away, I'm sure he did too.

But it's one of the great things, as well as the sometimes-downfall of humankind - that we can still be friends despite our differences. I have friends and friendly acquaintances who have fundamental ideas so different then mine that it amazes me that we can even be civil. Yet I'm friends and on good terms with these people.

And then, the other and opposite hand, you have the people who were good friends but who turn on you for the smallest and most unreasonable thing. Whether it's hard feelings for imagined problems, drunkenness due to work and family pressures, or what-have-you. Oh, now I am getting personal...

Humans are funny creatures, that's for sure.

Indian River Conservancy trail
I stumbled across a couple interesting trails, off the seasonal Burns Road outside of the Redwood area (I sometimes wander on the way home after doing some work for clients).

Yes, I had my trusty GPS this time - 44'19.599N -75'44.450W (Still have to work on learning more functions of the GPS, so many and so much potential I haven't tapped yet).

These are apparently on state DEC land but the trails themselves (as well as the parking spaces) are created and maintained by the Indian River Conservancy. I couldn't find any website on them. But the trails look interesting, though some are very rough-looking. My trail page on it - click here.

I took a quick walk along one and at one point a cable of some sort was hanging across the trail just above head-height. After leaving and driving down the road I went by a house (with apparently no lines to National Grid ['National Greed' as my wife writes on the checks]). The cable seemed to go down and hill and into some solar panels. Wonder what the other end of the cables was powering at the top of the hill?

I also took a few shots of abandoned buildings on this road and the one leading to it. There was one old building far, far off the road and surrounded by high brush and woods. I would have loved to look at it closer, know the story behind it, etc. Fascinating stuff, and never enough time to do everything.

BTW, check out my Old Abandoned Buildings of Northern NY website if you like old buildings, I got lots of them!

More Canon A570 IS
Check out these two pics. I noticed this helicopter flying sideways nearby. Yea, it was windy but not THAT windy. It had some sort of device attached to it's side, which it seemed to be keeping pointed toward a large electric line that runs nearby. Camera, IR?

Anyway, I took a few shots at extreme zoom (full optical, full digital) not expecting a very good picture due to the above as well as the wind buffeting me back and forth and the overcast day, not to mention not wanting to mess with switching it off AUTO.

Surprisingly I got some pretty good pics, with a shutter speed good enough to capture the individual blades.

Scribefire Addon for Firefox
If you do a lot a lot of blogging, or even just occasionally, and you have the inkling and resources for yet another Firefox addon for Firefox check out Scribefire (formerly Performancing). It lets you blog from right inside a pane at the bottom of Firefox. Nice, though there are some idiosyncrasies that can be annoying. Overall real nice, though I do finishing up in Blogger itself (once I learn all the quirks I believe I will be comfortable enough with it to use it completely). Still working on figuring out how the API works for uploading.