Category Archives: Photo

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging

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High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging is the process of taking several pictures of the same subject with different exposures and then combining all of them to produce an image with a wide range of intensity levels. In other words, HDR uses the pictures with longer exposure to obtain more detail and color on the darker parts of the picture and does the opposite with the pictures with short exposure. The end result is a picture that is closer to what your eyes actually see.

To produce an HDR image you take several pictures of the same subject using different exposures. You must use a tripod because you want all the pictures to align perfectly. At minimum you will take 3 pictures: one underexposed, one overexposed and one that is just normal (with the ‘right’ amount of exposure), but you can take more using different levels of under and over exposure.


Once you have the pictures, you need an imaging software to merge them. I first tried to follow these instructions using Gimp on my Ubuntu virtual image, but the process was really slow and the result wasn’t very good. Notice how the merged pictures don’t align perfectly:

Then I downloaded a trial version of Adobe Photoshop CS4 and the best thing is that it does all the merging and aligning for you and here is the result of that:

The result looks good, but I’m not impressed. I’ve seen really amazing HDR pictures on the web, so I’m going to keep experimenting with it and post any further progress I make with this technique.

Loving the Paella

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Last Friday I was hanging with some friends enjoying a few beers at the Crown and Anchor pub when someone mentioned that the 6th Annual Paella Lovers United was going to be held on Saturday. I’ve never heard about this Paella event so my friend explained how it works: several teams compete by cooking Paellas in two categories: traditional and keep-paella-weird and the crowd can taste all of them. Besides the Paellas, there are also tapas and drinks (Sangria, wine, beer), and live flamenco music for people to enjoy. You pay $30 dollars to get in, but it is totally worth it.

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Check all the pictures here.

Road trip to New Mexico

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Last weekend Cristin and I went on a road trip to New Mexico and visited some of its sites. We wanted to see Santa Fe, but besides that nothing was planned. I took Friday off at work and we drove from Austin to Santa Rosa where we spent the night. Santa Rosa is very small, it’s pretty, but the ratio between inhabitants and hotel beds must be somewhere by 1 to 200. The next morning we drove (that is, Cristin drove and Daniel took pictures along the road) to Santa Fe and we spent all day walking around the city. Santa Fe is really beautiful and it is very famous for all the art you can find and buy over there. We had delicious lunch at ‘Cowgirl’ (recommended by Eva) and went to a couple of museums (Santa Fe Museum of Modern Art and Government Palace, which, despite its name, is a history museum). Next morning we had a yummy brunch at ‘Santa Fe Bakery Co.’

Then we drove to Alamogordo to see the White Sand National Park. We got there around 5pm and stayed in the park until 9pm. This park is amazing and highly recommended. The sand is really really white and it looks like it should taste of vanilla. Despite being a desert, it has a rich flora and fauna and when we did a ranger-guided tour we were amazed by some of the facts that we learned… like you stand on top of a seven-meter-dune with a spiny little flower on top, and you learn that it’s in fact a seven-meter-flower? Amazing.
We stayed that night in Alamogordo and the next morning drove all the way back to Austin.

Remember, it’s not a road trip unless you get stopped by the police at least once – sirens optional but yield extra points!

(post written by Daniel and Cristin sneaked into it and added some things that she thought should be there)

New Mexico pictures

Posting your pictures online

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Sharing your pictures on the web seems like a very trivial matter, right? well I can tell you it is not that trivial. Here is my story.

Back in 2004 when I first created Chichipanguanorrea I chose Fotopic as the solution for sharing my pictures. The interface was ugly but uploading the pictures was very easy with a Java-based plugin. Unfortunately the free version of Fotopic has a limit of 250 MB which I reached a couple of years ago. Today if you ask me to rate Fotopic, I would give them a 4 out of 10.

flickr
Later in 2005 I created a flickr account and started uploading pictures. Since the free version of flickr has a limit on the amount of data you can upload each month and it only shows the last 200 pictures (the rest of the pictures can still be accessed through perma-links), I decided to use flickr as the place to upload ONLY my best pictures. I really like many of the features flickr offers: tags, a huge community, nice interface, geo-tagging, but the limitations prevents it from being the best option for uploading tons of pictures.

In 2006 I decided to try some options I could easily integrate with my WordPress blog: I tried FAlbum and Gallery but it was zenphoto who won my heart. I installed zenphoto in my blog and have been using it since then. It is really easy to upload the pictures and the galleries are created automatically. My only complain would be that including a picture inside a post is not so straight forward.

Today I decided to revamp my picture gallery after updating my blog with the latest WordPress distribution available last night. I’m between upgrading my zenphoto installation to the latest version which has some new features or trying NextGen gallery, a WordPress plugin that seems to be very popular among WordPress users. The good news is that I can try NextGen without removing my current zenphoto installation nor I have to duplicate my picture galleries.

Here are some examples of how NextGen works:

Test 1: adding a picture with the reflection effect
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Test 2: adding a picture with a watermark
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Test 3: adding a gallery

At this point I’m liking NextGen a lot, but I’m having trouble getting the pictures to show up. I think this is because I’m pointing to the pictures from zenphoto and the permissions might not be properly set up. I noticed that even in zenphoto I cannot open a picture file directly

Trip to New Orleans

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New Orleans

New Orleans

New Orleans

New Orleans

New Orleans

New Orleans

New Orleans

Are you a really good brother or are you that stupid?

I must say that you have to be both, to drive from Austin to New Orleans by yourself to only stay four days (2 of which I spent driving). My sister went to New Orleans because The Acoustical Society of America was meeting at the creole city and I figured it was a good idea for us to meet over there. We stayed at a very well located hotel (The Chateau Dupré) right in the french quarter so we never had to drive anywhere. We walked the french quarter and the garden district, had good food at different places, visited the Lafayette cemetery, took the St. Charles Streetcar, had coffee and beignets at Cafe Du Monde and Hand grenades at Bourbon St.

Pictures available here.

Monterrey 2007

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I spent most of last week in Monterrey, Nuevo León, México. The purpose of the trip was mainly to see the concert Me verás volver of Soda Stereo, one of my favorite bands ever. The concert was AMAZING! Check Marcos‘ blog for the chronicle and take a look at the official concert photos here and here.

Besides seeing Soda Stereo, we also went to the Fórum Universal de las Culturas 2007 at Parque Fundidora and saw the exhibition Isis y la serpiente emplumada (Isis and the Feathered Serpent), walked around the Macroplaza, went to the MUNE museum to see the Buddha: Guanyin exhibition, to the History of Mexico museum (my 3rd time there!), to the Marco museum to see the first Julio Galán exhibition after his death and to the Tecnológico stadium to watch the soccer game América vs Monterrey.

It was a great trip and you can see it by yourself.