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Earth's true ancient pokemon revealed! 
Have you ever wondered if "they" were real? You know, some fantastic creature in your imagination. Many of us have seen photographs of beautiful and scary sea creatures and have said, WOW. Artists have drawn on the mysterious creatures of the deep for inspiration when creating fantastic aliens. The characters of Bikini Bottom in Spongebob Squarepants come from the sea. But what about Pokemon? The creature on the right is an actual ocean creature affectionately named the Dumbo Octopus. The creature on the right is also affectionately named, Pkachu from Pokemon. "Welcome to the deep Pikachu." My sister pointed out this book to me, and I'm ordering a copy. What a great coffee table book for the kids inspiration and nightmares. "The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss" by Claire Nouvian. Go check it out. They're not all cute and adorable like the guy above. HDR ExperimentationI decided to dable in some HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. It's been all the rage for a while now. It's time for me to catch up. It's a technique that is effective when taking photos of scenes or objects that have a great variance in lighting. A standard photograph would over expose some of the scene, and under expose others. By shooting a series of photographs at different exposures, you can use the computer to combine the photos into one taking the best portion of each image into the final product. There are a few ways to do this. Many require using Photoshop to manually tweak the image. For me, I've chosen a piece of software called Photomatix. Its custom designed for HDR photography, and simplifies the task. Since I'm just experimenting yet, I only have the trial version of the software. If I find the technique useful, then I'll purchase the full version.
If you want to learn HDR for yourself, see this tutorial. The software I used, Photomatix, is here.
The professional examples are much better than mine. I've chosen to tweak my final photo a lot and bring up the saturation to pronounce the colors in my [messy] office, below. The church and the skyline are some other people's examples.
Original - Note how the image on the monitor is over exposed and the room is dark and underexposed. This is the middle exposure image from the set of 9 raw shots. 
HDR Tone Mapped - Notice how a variety of light sources have been leveled so most of the image is neither too dark or too light. This is the blending of 9 braketed RAW images at different exposures. 
In a situation like the one above, a flash might be practical for illuminating the room more evenly. In some cases, a flash is not practical. (i.e. a very large space, or outdoors with lights and shadows) or would remove some of the more interesting aspects of the lighting in the image. When tone mapping an HDR image, you can over-saturate it to bring out the colors which may be washed out by bright lighting.
See some good examples (not mine) below.
Jose Maria Cuellar's "The prayers" 
Altus' Tokyo Nightscape  Minneapolis now on Live maps arial view!
Update: I neglected to provide a link to the Live Maps tool in my post. My apologies. It's http://maps.live.com/ Once on a map, click on the "switch to bird's eye view" button" as shown below. You have to be zoomed in far enough for that button to be active.
Welcome to the Halo betaToday marks the first day of the Halo 3 beta. To celebrate, I'm posting a Mac vs. PC parody comic that I made. It's based on frames of artwork that someone else originally made. (Source is offline.) I got some blurbs from a couple contributors that I used for the Mac guy and added my own little story twist. Voila. A Mac vs. Halo parody comic. Enjoy. (Or not!) Heavy Weapons GuyNew Team Fortress 2 video. Brilliant.
Halo 3 Zune
She's a beauty. :) See Cesar's unboxing video in his blog. I love FPS
I have a confession to make. I suck at FPS games. But I still love them. In a fair fight, I get my @$$ kicked. At the same time, when I get killed, I'm usually laughing like a fool. I do get in the groove sometimes. I do better at team games where people are working together. I think it's usually because it forces me to plan better and not just rush in.
Here's my profile, including the Halo 3 beta. (What is public, at any rate.) Vancouver Trip
I have some of the photos up already, and more are on their way tonight. Swing in PS3 bashing?
So, to limit the amount of PS3 bashing in the media, it looks like headlines have been targeted based on controversy. Never happens. Engaging readers by controversial titles never sells papers. The intro says: “Rockstar creative vice president Dan Houser has admitted that bringing the next iteration of GTA to the Xbox 360 is more challenging because there's no guarantee of a hard drive in every unit and disc space is limited to DVD instead of Blu-ray.” The funny thing is that his response to a targeted question on the 360 was “Yep. To be honest with you we haven't solved all those riddles yet.” GameDaily goes on to point out that they’ve been having design riddles with both the 360 and PS3 in their own unique ways. Imagine this.. Question: “Dan, did you ever struggle with fears of the dark when you were a kid?” Answer: “Yup.” “Dan Houser admits to having a fear of the dark. This could impact his ability to perform his job as Vice President in the darkened offices at Rockstar. Important decisions are being made around how next gen the GTA series will look on the PS3 and Xbox 360. Will Dan cripple the next generation of gaming's most controversial title based on potentially untreated mental issues?”
Off to la la land
I'm flying to Los Angeles first thing Thursday morning. I have a 6:40am flight and I get back in the evening at 10pm. It'll be one of those in-and-out trips. I wonder if I'll have time for an in-and-out burger? Hmm... I have to get up early to leave the house by 5am.
Monday was Zack's birthday. The photos are here. Tina's birthday was Tuesday. The photo is here. Why do I look so OLD? Actually, I thought I looked like Ben from lost earlier.
I'm only bringing my camera phone to LA. It's not worth lugging the SLR. Tina has a party Thursday evening, so I'm leaving the point and shoot for her. We'll see if I have any interesting camera phone photos when I get back.
Adios! |
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