HDR images have recently caught my interest. At their best they are stunning, evocative images that appear from a different part of your brain—someplace after you’ve peered into the shadows and squinted through the glare. Or else some place that just dropped acid. Some really cool stuff and some weird misses. I was intrigued.

I check into it and find I have the low rent ingredients to try it myself. My Lumix FZ7 supports exposure bracketing, and it can capture TIF images. Troy clued me into Qtpsfgui “a Qt4 graphical user interface that aims to provide a workflow for HDR imaging” and I’m off to the races.

And here are some of my early results from shots I took along Folsom Street.

This image taught me the use of single image (raw or TIF) HDR images. The 3 exposure image on the left has fun with a vivid, blurred, almost painterly effect, while the single exposure image on the right uses the color depth to see into the late afternoon moment.

Another single exposure image that worked out:

There were plenty of experiments along the way that you won’t see that were part of the fun. Qtpsfgui? Lots of rough edges. Slow. Hog. Endless incomprehensible knobs and levers to frob. The name, qtpsfgui, has about as much elan as the UI. After a while I found a handful of combinations that were useful. The rest? A waste of space as far as I can tell, that would melt away in a decent UI. But hey, the UI can get better. The image processing works (slowly) but the results often need help. I’m sure that’s where Photoshop comes to the rescue.

But I’m having fun with my low-rent HDR rig.

My first challenge here at my new home was to import all my old posts from blogger to WordPress.  WordPress can import blogs from many different blog hosting tools: posts, comments, blogrolls, everything.  But they have not caught up with the newly revised blogger.com blogs yet.  The current distribution of WordPress does not support imports from the new blogger.  And my blog had already been upgraded!

The support forums revealed a hack plugin that uses a sites RSS feed to import any feed into WP.  This hack is pretty limited since you don’t capture comments and various other types of blog content.  But hey, it beats not importing at all so I tried it.  Luckily I could not get the plugin to work.  I say luckily because it forced me to dig a little deeper into the fora where I found a different style of hack.

The “commercial” or hosted version of WP is found at wordpress.com.  That site lets you sign up for a free blog hosted by WP.  They support imports from the new blogger.  I signed up, imported my old stuff… flawlessly.  From there I was able to import my worldpress.com blog here.

Now my challenge is that I have 500+ old posts that I have to sift through, one by one, to determine if I want to keep it, and what category to file it under…  Dull work ahead…

Which is actually my oldest home on the web. Imajazz.com was my first domain and I still use my kc@imajazz.com.

For months now I’ve been uncertain about the future of my personal blogging. This move is one step towards re-purposing and reinvigorating this channel.

The immediate motivation for the move is to let me directly tinker with my blogging tool. At blogger.com everything is taken care of for you, and there is less room for customization. Here I run the whole show. I install and administer the WordPress tools that publish this blog. I can configure the site as I want. I can install plugins to extend the basic functionality. Already I’m playing with Flickr integration and sitemaps. I may try out some polls and other goodies. WP also provides some content management capabilities that will allow me to publish other non-bloggy pages that will be integrated into this site’s navigation and share the same design.

But who really cares about KC’s blog? Almost no one. But I have my own reasons for experimenting and building a better home nest.

OK, so digg dug a dud. Maybe that’s a bit harsh.

The code for blogging a Flickr slideshow above is buggy. Not what it was advertised. Looks to me like the set_id parameter is not working. I just get my most recent shots.

Which is OK. It’s still fun to have that there. But it sure would be nice to correctly specify a slideshow. If any readers come here with more info, code fix suggestions, leave a comment.

Thanks to Digg, I found a cool recipe for embedding Flickr slideshows in a blog.

Here’s my summer vacation set, which may actually be of interest to the friends and family that make up a the majority of the audience here:

I used MapBuilder.net to quickly cook up this map: KC’s map of lunks spots in the East Bay

Not bad at all for a tool-generated map. The tool definitely has its limits, but it also makes it very, very easy to pull off a map like this. The collaboration feature is pretty cool too. (Charles, let’s do that noodle joint idea!)

Ars Technica linked me up to a very cool, very concise, very simple, clear treatise on the crux of the net neutrality issue, Tim Berners-Lee on Net Neutrality: “This is serious.”:

Don’t let the telcos break the Internet.

Read the Ars article, but be sure to read Berners-Lee’s original post, Net Neutrality: This is serious:

I hope that Congress can protect net neutrality, so I can continue to innovate in the Internet space. I want to see the explosion of innovations happening out there on the Web, so diverse and so exciting, continue unabated.

There is a lot of dense information out there about what this issue is, what it means, and why it is or is not necessary to act now. But this short post by one of the primary inventors of the Internet, by one who has continued to surf on the vanguard of the web and all it’s possibilities, is the most potent arguments for protecting network neutrality.

The The second post ever on this blog was a link to the first Art of Science gallery. Now it’s time for round two.

2006 Art of Science gallery is up. But frankly I’m not as blown away. There are some very nice images, but a lot of them don’t grab me that much. And I’m not at all sure I like the addition of videos. I guess I’m just a sucker for a good still shot.

But really. Take this picture of lichen. Then take a look at the shot I got last weekend at pinnacles. I ask you now. Which one do you like better? I’m not bragging or anything (well, not too much), I just think thye could have done better. And that’s one of the ones I liked. Oh well. I shouldn’t complain too much. There are some really cool images. Again.