Mike Cohen

Experimenting with HDR

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I did some experimenting with HDR photography at sunset today, although the result wasn’t as impressive as I had hoped, for several reasons. I didn’t use a tripod, so the shots had to be aligned. I probably didn’t use enough exposure range; I only used EV of -1 and +1. Finally, since the sky was very clear, the sunset wasn’t that colorful.

I used my D40x, shooting raw using program mode with exposure compensation. I imported the pictures into Photoshop and used the Merge to HDR function.

My first HDR

HDR 2

HDR 3

Nothing lasts forever

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I’m sure everyone has heard about Microsoft offering to buy Yahoo.

Yahoo owns two sites I use regularly, Flickr and del.icio.us. It isn’t clear how they’d be affected if Microsoft does buy Yahoo.

When we trust our data to a site like Flickr, we trust that it will always be there. I’m not predicting that they’ll disappear, but if they do, our data will also be gone.

As an alternative to Flickr, I may switch to either Zooomr or Picassa. I’ve had Picassa for a while, but I never really used it until I got my Eye-Fi card and set it up as the default upload site.

For del.icio.us, the alternative seems to be be ma.gnolia, which I signed up for a long time ago but pretty much forgot about.

Instapaper

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Instapaper is a new site that does one simple thing: it lets you save a URL to read later.

I still love del.icio.us for permanent bookmarks, but Instapaper is much simpler. No tags or description — simply use the Read Later bookmarklet to save the page. You can then go back to your Instapaper page to see the list of URLs you saved.

It’s so simple you don’t even create an account. Just enter your email address or make up a user name. It doesn’t even require a password, although you can set one if you prefer.

It can even be used for simple collaboration. If a few people use the same name, they can send pages to each other.