The incredibly useful dpreview.com has an announcement for a new release of the image noise reduction program Neat Image. If you’ve got photos which are grainy because you are pushing your camera to the limits of its ISO setting, try putting Neat Image to work on it. I’ve blogged about it before, it’s very cool, and worth the money.
Category Archives: My Photos
More fun with reflecting balls
After yesterday’s post, I decided that I’d like to try to make some better reflection maps. So I shot this image of my office reflecting in a Christmas tree ball. The image is pretty noisy because my office isn’t brightly lit. (Addendum: I also had the camera set for outdoor white balance, which makes the overall image look pretty crufty. I just shot a different image, and got this better image, which has a magenta hue, but isn’t yellow orange at least.) I then cropped it to a square containing just the ball, and passed it through my unwarping program:
I have a different version of my program that produces a cube map, which is perhaps more intelligible (click on it for a bigger version):
It appears that the quality is pretty much limited by the poor surface of the reflecting ball. You can see a lump in the ball causes the book in the foreground to have a distorted outline.
Still, fun stuff.
Cool video experiment
Video Thing has a cool experiment in shooting panoramic video using a Christmas tree ball mounted on a boom in front of a DV cam. An After Effects plugin turns the resulting reflection into a cylindrical environment video. Very cool.
I did some experiments a while ago using this setup, only with still images instead of video. My old Kodak 210+ wouldn’t focus close enough to get a good image of the ball, so I turned out this:
The code was pretty simple to write: just convert from reflected rayspace into a cylindrical map. Cool stuff.
Weekend Pic
Carmen and I spent a short weekend at Reno/Tahoe, and I snapped this picture of her at the shore of Lake Tahoe. A nice trip, alas, all to short. Love you honey! Every moment with you is a vacation all by itself.
Picture seems overblown because I used my cameraphone, and let’s face it, it’s not the greatest camera.
Pinhole photography
The article on the Dirkon Paper Camera reminded me of the couple of pinhole photographs I made using a simple cylinder of cardboard and some photographic paper.
Robogames 2005
Well, just got back from a day of watching robot combat at the Robogames competition in at San Francisco State. It continues tomorrow. You can look at my gallery of photos, and maybe even watch a Quicktime of a poor Robosapien competing in an event.
Carmen eating Dim Sum
This is mostly just a test designed to try out Flickr‘s Post-To-Blog functionality. Still, it’s a nice picture of my lovely wife munching Dim Sum at the King of Kings in Oakland. I’m not the biggest Dim Sum fan, but this place is among the better I’ve visited.
And of course, my wife is spectacular! Everyone congratulate her on starting her new job today!
A Day in Marin, In Pictures
I just created a new gallery of Carmen and my Day in Marin in my brainwagon photo gallery. We marched around Muir Beach for a short walk, did a few mile loop at Muir Woods, and ended up searching for (and finding) a geocache on Mt. Tamalpais. Terrific day, but I’m worn out, so podcasting will have to wait for tomorrow morning.
By the way, how beautiful is this view? Or this one?
We also saw six salmon swimming in the stream, the best picture of which is probably this one. I haven’t seen salmon in the wild in a long time. Very cool.
How not to describe a wine you wish to sell…
Today I stopped by Cost Plus again, as they had 40% off their Christmas stuff. While wandering the aisles looking for last minute stocking stuffers, I saw the following description above the wine:
Very ripe and round — almost like a Jolly Rancher candy. The plums, cherries and red berries jump out of the glass!
I think this is the first time that I’ve heard a wine described as if tasting like a Jolly Rancher was a good thing. While I have nothing against Jolly Rancher’s as a candy, I sincerely doubt their flavor when fermented.
Of course Cost Plus is the seller of what I consider to be quite possibly the worst wine ever created: their Electric Reindeer White Zinfandel. While all three wines are truly terrible, their White Zin, with its overtones of cough syrup, Kool-Aid and Vicks Vaporub makes you long for the taste of a fresh batch of Pruno.
Christmas at the Oakland Zoo
Well, today marked another nice trip to the Oakland Zoo. As always, I brought my digital camera so I could snap some pictures of the animals, and I managed to catch a nice photo of these two giraffes. It was a good day for photos, I got some more nice photos of the meerkats, and had a nice walk amidst the animals.
Nice way to relax, far away from the hustle and bustle of the malls.
Try this picture of some meerkats, or look at all the photos in this gallery.
Pictures of the Hopper…
As I mentioned in my audio blog today, I was diverted from my mornings appointments by this little guy who appeared on my windshield as I was about to drive off. I just had to fetch my Nikon 4300 and snap some pictures of him. Try clicking on the thumbnail to the right to get a higher resolution of him, or you can look at this Quicktime of him breathing for extra creepiness.
Another Zoo Pic
Here is another picture from my weekend zoo excursion. Surprisingly, these little guys have proven to be very hard to photograph, largely because they blend into the background so my autofocus fails with disturbing regularity. This is probably the best of the batch that I took this weekend, but the focus is a teeny bit soft. Someday I’m going to have to trade in my Nikon 4300 for something different.