New flickr feature

I just noticed a small new feature on flickr: photo stats.

It requires a pro account to use (which I don't have) so I can see exactly what it does.

My favorite XKCD comics

After watching the video of Randall Munroe (the creator of XKCD) give a speech at Google, I thought that I would post my favorite XKCD comics.

Top 10 songs of 2007

Jeph Jacques of questionablecontent.net just released his list of his top 10 songs of 2007.

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!

DHTML image page

After my last post I made a DHTML page that switches between the two images (from the last post) depending on where the mouse is. It works by putting the two images on top of each other, and switching the order.

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)