Went to Grängesberg today for a visit, my brother and his girlfriend was visiting, they arrived yesterday from Stockholm, today arrived his girlfriends mother from Orsa. With me I had my sister from Gubbo. =)

Mum's orchids still bloomed. Perfect subject to calibrate camera on. ;)
Marit and Hanna doing crafts. Bracelets apparently.
Juha preparing food for the BBQ.
Hanna concentrated working on the pearls.
My brother did a fine job with the BBQ spits!
Meat on the grill!
My mother got a gift from Marits mother.
Juha took over the BBQ:ing so I could take some photos.
Time to eat!
My plate.
Hanna's plate.
It was simply delicious!
Checking out the results from the crafting.
It had been cloudy and raining, suddenly the sun came out, just before it was about to set.
After digesting the food for a couple of hours and some talking it was time to go home. Hanna demonstrated a Android app that just display the current speed, here in the HUD-mode, pretty cool actually! It's called SpeedView.
Now, time to sleep!

Brenzier attempt.

Testing something that apparently called "The Brenzier method". It's to shoot a lot of shots with a large aperture lens (preferably a tele lens) and then stitch the images to create a complete photo.

To mimic the look of medium format or large format photography, the method is widely known by the work of Ryan Brenizer.

I made a try with my Nikon D90 and the 180mm Tamron macro set to f3.5:



I used 47 photos to cover the whole car, stitched to one image in Photoshop. A lot of strange perspective errors in the photos but it's just for test. Wish I'd had camera dolly too keep everything in plane. =)

Casio EX-FH100, HDR-test.

Brought my month old Casio EX-FH100 with me this evening when I shot some sunset photos with my Nikon D90.

Thought I'd try the manual mode on the Casio, not as convenient to bracket shots with the compact as with my DSLR (naturally) but it shows it's ok if one has no other option. :)

6-7 exposures at ISO 100, tone mapped in Photomatix and some final touches is Photoshop:

"Hällarna", Ludvika.

Retro 2

Playing with FX Camera. This one is the "Polaroid" look.

This shot was a better example...

Winter planets...

Just fooling around with a few recent photos in Photoshop using this guide: http://content.photojojo.com/tutorials/create-your-own-panorama-planets/

Electric Sheep goes HD

One of the coolest screen savers (who still use them?) has been updated!

By installing it on your computer you contribute to calculate the amazing visuals it displays on the screen when activated.



Their web page seems a bit over loaded right now though... ;)

It's about time!

Finally it's possible to install ad-blockers and such in Chrome! It's a big step to be a option to use besides Firefox. ;)

Code testing...

Gizmooops? (Updated)

Updated!
There was a entry in Gizmodo just moments ago that said that Google's Chrome OS now was available! Tried to click the link but it just took me back to the front page, did however a screen shot of the browser window.

Now the link is nowhere to be found. Perhaps it was a premature breaking news? Hmm....

Update: More about the fake news here - http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/174593/beware_the_fake_google_chrome_os_download.html

Finally!

This is a what I have been waiting for, many years ago I wondered why nobody had made a scale with wireless connection before, or a scale that connects to a logging device.

Well, there has been scales that do log the weight but they were not really aimed at the consumer market, more towards medical sector and they are expensive! Apparently this one costs about 1500:- Sek, shipping excluded...



Withings - Videos

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Moving stills...

Another video with still images, think I like it more and more, have to play around more with the settings some day. The face recognizing feature in Picasa 3.5 has kept me busy lately! :)

Pan & Zoom

Have seen some nice slide shows where the images are sliding and panned and as many times turned out they had been made on a Mac. Unfortunately I don't own a Mac so I have been trying to find something similar to windows.

Seems like Microsoft has something like that in vistas movie maker but that can't be run in XP, surprise!

Decided to download latest version of Picasa and see if it could solve the problem and it sure did! Exactly what I was looking for! Very simple but I suppose that's what they have aimed for.

First test:

Getting calibrated!

Finally got my hands on a monitor calibrator (colorimeter)!

Wrote about buying one some time ago but there has been other holes to put money in so it had been on hold for a while but this week I put in an order at Cyberfoto.se after I figured out how to get free shipping. :)

I got the ColorVision Spyder2express.

Don't know if it did a huge impact on the color setting but sure there was a difference before and after. The main thing is that it gives a peace of mind knowing that I have done what I can to get proper color setting on the monitor.

Uploaded two amazing, award winning grade movies of the unpacking and the calibration procedure!
Unpacking:

Calibration:

Moonshine...

Got out late this evening to try capture the moon shining on the sky, took the Nikon D90 equipped with the Nikkor 35mm/f1.8 to try out the low light capabilities.

I took some ISO1600 shots at f1.8 but the clouds were moving too fast to get decent HDR images, the moon itself is very bright and has to be shot either with small aperture or fast shutter.

Best I managed to take tonight.
Decided to try some long exposure shots instead. 15sec. ISO 1600.
It was almost pitch black, I could not see the lake in the background at all!
And a couple of HDR images. ISO 200 and f2.4 - 5-6 different exposures and tone mapped in Photomatix.
Hmm, think I should be sleeping right now... =)

Another video...

Deshaked a bunch of videos from a ride the 9:th of January, newer minded to make any video since the footage looked sooo bad, shaky and jerky. But now I think I'm getting to results that are in the ok range, a few strange artifacts here and there but that's easy to oversee when compared to the original shots!

Here's the result. It was a beautiful winter day! Enjoy! =)



Have to go through my all videos now... =)
Think this will make me use the video capture on the Nikon D90 way more than I have done so far!
Just have figure out how to automate the process as far as possible in VirtualDub, should be doable in the CLI that comes with the software.

DeShAkInG...

Updated:
Long time coming but last night I finally started to play around with Deshaker, a video stabilizer for VirtualDub, all free open source software! All partly thanks to Tobbe who posted some links in the comments on his blog. Have thought about checking it out many times but never came around to it.

It totally ruined my nights sleep, stayed up way past bedtime to fiddle around with the settings. Still not totally pleased but hopefully I will find a suitable setting.

This is the best I managed so far, it takes some time to process the video sequences. If I ever find a good setting it sure will end up with some less barf-provoking videos than the handhold straight out-of-the-camera videos I get now from the Nikon D90.



Update: A comparison video, the straight out of camera file.


I'll try to post some more informative post later with before and after examples and details on what settings I used.

The software is pretty straightforward but can look somewhat intimidating in at first glance. =)

Ye olde tune

Having a bad cold right now and not being able to do anything physical I found my self googling on old Atari ST games and remembered a game with a jester that had a tune that I liked, this was perhaps 1988 or 1989, only 20 years ago. =)

After some hardcore powergoogling I managed to find out that the game was called Black Lamp and the character you played was called Jack the Jester. Never finished the game, which was pretty difficult if I remember correctly but the tune got stuck in my mind.

After I found out the games name I could find the title tune on YouTube but still couldn't find the tune I remembered.

This is the title song:

After yet some more googling I located the Atari ST YM2149 archive After downloading the whole archive and unpacking it I had to find a player and there was a link to WinJAM (Just Another Music player). Works great, small and nimble!

Lo and behold, the second track was the tune I was looking for! Wanted to put the tune on the net but didn't know how to 'rip' the music so I started to look for a audio ripper that could rip music directly from the sound card.

Found s software that I think I have used some time before OpD2d. After installing it I noticed that there was a red dot in the JAM-player, after pressing it I could make a WAV-file directly from JAM!! Doh! :)


Choose HD for best sound quality

While looking for the tune on YouTube it turned out that the tune was based on "Greensleeves" also called "What child is this". When thinking about it I suppose I have heard it sometime.

Found several versions on YouTube:











And yes, I'm getting bored being sick... ;)

Old-school style

Stumbled on a link to this page: http://runhello.com/

It has the look of and game play style of old games, very simple graphics but that's secondary, it's all about the game play. =)

The info on the developer page sums it up well:

---

FEATURES

• Old-school puzzle platforming with some twists
• Low-definition graphics
• Gamepad support
• Full level editor

PLOT

• Guide Jumpman to the exit.

---

Here you can download both a windows and a macintoch version of this game:

It's around 3mb small and for FREE! :)

When unzip:ed you start by opening the .exe file and start playing, starts off pretty simple and very soon it starts to get harder to progress. It's one of those 'just-another-level-then-I-quit' kind of games. :)

Art Of Illusion

In my quest of self promotion here's some old renders I found on my hard drive, I know I have more recent ones and hopefully a bit better but I couldn't locate the images. Well, I'm not sure these will promote me in a positive way but I'll post them here anyway! :)
All made in the free software called Art Of Illusion.

A Brio baby toy with a bell inside.
A surrealistic blob.
Random pills.
Another surreal scene, four shiny spheres.A Pilot pen and a Faber-Castell.An attempt to make my own environmental mapping texture.
Perhaps a pimped waiting room?
Kraftwerk robot rip off.
Another Kraftwerk inspired scene.
Attempt at modelling a Niciolai Helious FR MTB frame.
Padlock, really pleased with the textures on this one.
Transparent blobs.Ninja star also known as shuriken.
A Yamaha logo
Yet another attempt to model the Magnum 357.

Lunch break beetle...

If someone missed it we got a ton a snow the last few days. To seize the moment I got my photo gear and during my lunch break I drove to a location where there's a old junk car.

Managed to shoot a few photos of the Volkswagen Beetle from different angles in about 20 minutes.



The HDR-images is made with Photomatix, a no time limit demo-version availabe at their homepage: http://www.hdrsoft.com/

Wish the sun had shine, would have made all the difference for the light, well got some exercise mushing thru the snow and some climbing the steep road. =)