Spring is here (photo)

The other day I was taking a walk and saw this tree bud blooming, so I took a few pictures of it. Here's the best one:

Another picture of the snow day

So this blog is slowly becoming a photography blog. Oh well, I like photography blogs. Anyway, here's the picture:

Snow day

It snowed here yesterday (for the first time this winter), so I went out with my camera and took some picture. Here's one:

A note on taking picture of snow: set the exposure compensation to +1 ev or else the picture will be much too dark (the white of all the snow confuses the camera).

HDR of a tree

Here's an HDR I took the other day:

This was made in Qtpfsgui.

Qtpfsgui

Qtpfsgui looks like a bunch of random letters, but it's actually the name of a free HDR creation program. I just found out about it today as I was reading the latest popular science magazine. Here's a sample of what can be made with it. For more HDRs made with Qtpfsgui, you can go over to the flickr group.

2 billion photos

Congrats to flickr on their 2,000,000,000th photo!

Picture of pencils

This is an image I took the other day of some color pencils I had lying around.
I started with the picture on the left (see below), and edited it to what you see above. How I made the change is as follows:
I duplicated the image layer, and set layer mode to value (that way the color stays the same, just the luminosity is affected). Then I increased the contrast of the new layer with the levels tool, and merged the layer down. Then I lowered the saturation, and duplicated the layer (I now have two layers). On the new layer, I did a 5PX gaussian blur, set the layer mode to overlay, set the opacity to 20%, and did a merge down. Finnaly that I applied an unsharpen mask with a radius of 5PX.
(If you click on the image you can more clearly see the difference between the two)

Flickr widget

For fun, I just made a flickr widget:

Flickr badge

Just trying out the flickr flash badge:

www.flickr.com

Darn. Blogger doesn't let it work.

Best looking photos on the web

The dude over at XKCD has made a web program that uses user input to find the best looking picutres on the web. It's called thefairest.info. The page of the 'Fairest'.
There are some really great photos there. None of them are mine.....

The first flower of spring (photo)

I took this picture with a canon SD 600. Lots of detail in the original.