blogable.eu

As I mentioned two days ago, it was time to redesign my blog. I wanted a cleaner, more stylish design and I hope I succeeded creating this.

While the whole shabang isn’t quite finished yet and might underlay more changes, I hope that it’s easier to find your way around and more pleasant to spend time on my blog.

Some features I added are:

- easier translation of single posts

- quick sharing options with various networks

- Flickr integration for my Project 365

- Twitter integration into the mobile version

There are a lot more minor changes I don’t want to mention explicitly, but I’m nevertheless proud of every single one of them.

I appreciate suggestions regarding the new layout, so leave me a comment.

WordPress 3 is available and I directly upgraded to see what it’s like. It does look a little smoother but I can’t say much more yet.

I just celebrated my first year with this blog and decided to change it a bit. The topics will stay, but I’d like to change the layout and give my blog a cleaner look.

These changes won’t happen overnight, so I hope you bare with me during the constructions. The weather this weekend is supposedly bad. This means that I’m aiming to finish everything by Sunday. I welcome all comments on ideas and opinions regarding the new design.

My blog is one year old. So:

Party on, dudes! ;D

Thanks to all readers and subscribers for reading my blog, which does vary greatly in the choice of topics. This is mostly due to my hobbies and whatever I refer to as interesting enough to spend time writing about. However, my main focus was, is and will remain centered around the topics computer – mobile phones – and life. The last topic is mostly used for my new found hobby; photography. I’m sure though, that soon enough I’ll find another thing to spend time and money on and I sure will write about that, too.

I would also like to thank @ischack (www.ischack.net) who helped me so many times not only with my blog, but also with topics I simply had no answers for.

Last but not least, I’d like to thank my girlfriend for correcting my language, as I’m not a native English speaker. I continuously manage to make mistakes that simply shouldn’t happen anymore, but she has her way of nicely poking me and teaching me ‘new’ rules.

Week 21 of my Project 365 is now online. Within this project I will make one picture a day and publish it regularly.

Visit my Flickr photostream to find out more.

Week 19 of my Project 365 is now online. Within this project I will make one picture a day and publish it regularly.

Visit my Flickr photostream to find out more.

Week 18 of my Project 365 is now online. Within this project I will make one picture a day and publish it regularly.

Visit my Flickr photostream to find out more.

Since I just posted an article on what HDR is and the link to how it’s done, I thought it’d be a good addition to let you know how to set up your camera.

Every camera that supports different exposures can take photos which can be merged into HDR-pictures on the computer. Generally, you’d take a normally exposed photo (0), a slightly underexposed photo (-2) and a slightly overexposed photo (+2) to achieve a good HDR-image result. This can easily be altered manually, but why the effort? The settings for HDR photos with a Canon EOS 500D (for example) are very straight forward. A feature called AE Bracketing will increase the likelihood of getting the exact same photo. This is vital to get a good result. Having to set the exposures manually may end up in photos that vary: clouds that moved on in between shots, for example. Some even suggest a remote control to decrease the chance of accidentally moving the tripod. AE Bracketing helps you very easily to take three shots with different preset exposures, allowing to get photos that were taken in a short amount of time. If you would like to make a HDR-image with more than three photos though, you’re on your own again.

Page 86 of the user manual will help you with the settings.

AE Bracketing on a Canon EOS 500D:

HDR(I) stands for High Dynamic Range (Imaging) and describes ‘… a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminance between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than standard digital imaging techniques …’. This may sound weird, but it isn’t. A photo that was taken, doesn’t always picture the scene as the eye has seen it. There will always be a part in a photo that is either too dark or too bright for the camera, never mind how well exposed it is. And this is where HDR kicks in.

HDR is based on a very simple idea: take three or more pictures of the exact same scene (two will do as well), varying from under- to overexposed and merge them on a computer. This way, a dark space on a photo will get enough detail because of the overexposed photo, while a really bright space will get more detail because of the underexposed photo. Merging the photos will therefore not only give you great color, but also detail. I might add though, that the result is a photo that depicts a mixture between substantiality and fiction. Depending on your settings, the result has the tendency to be the latter, with overly bright colors and extreme details.

A really nice read and how-to from Markus Urban is available at abuzeedo.com.

To achieve this, you have quite a few software alternatives to choose from. The one mentioned in the article: Photomatix Pro, if you don’t mind spending a few € or $ that is. I can’t promise great results, but this program is widely used and it even has a Lightroom plugin, so that you can just select the images, export them, create a HDR-image and re-import them directly. Another possibility is Photoshop. If you know your way around, this should serve you well. But there’s also a free program available, which is called Qtpfsgui and is waiting to be downloaded from here. One great thing about this software besides being free, it’s running on all platforms (Mac OS X, Linux, Windows).

Flickr offers various groups, where people may help you on how to get the perfect HDR-image done. This is an example from me:

Photos as taken:

Underexposed:

‘Normal’

Overexposed:

HDR-image result:

This and more photos from me are available at www.flickr.com/photos/blogable/.

Week 17 of my Project 365 is now online. Within this project I will make one picture a day and publish it regularly.

Visit my Flickr photostream to find out more.

Week 16 of my Project 365 is now online. Within this project I will make one picture a day and publish it regularly.

Visit my Flickr photostream to find out more.