Daily Archives: 8/30/2005

Goofing around with Digital Infrared

I took one of the infrared photos that I took on my recent Sonoma trip and tried tweaking it a bit in gimp to make it appear more dramatic. Check out my photo gallery to see both my after and before pictures.

Basically, I took the original and stretched the contrast, then applied some color curve modification to make the darks darker and the lights lighter. I then cloned some of the existing texture to eliminate the vignetting that appears in the corner, and then did some local burn/dodge type modifications. I like the overall result quite a bit.

I didn’t notice this before, but you can see a bird just to the left of the rock in this shot quite learly. I snapped a picture of him later, but didn’t notice him when I took this picture.

Impressive Satellite Pictures of Katrina

NASA has released a pretty amazing picture of Katrina as it approached landfall, with resolutions up to 6800×8000 pixels, and 250m per pixel. Click on the image to the right to be taken to the 2km per pixel version: the 250m version didn’t work in my browser.

Dave Slusher Hacks a $25 Digital Camera

Dave went out and bought himself a couple of those single use, $25 camcorders that CVS is selling these days, and hacked them to allow download of video. What is even better, he snapped video of the project and made it available for download.

Caveat: it appears to be encoded in some kind of Quicktime 7 specific codec. I haven’t bothered to get Quicktime 7 on my laptop, since it is beta still for Windows, but I did notice that it will play nice using VLC. Hooray for VLC!