My first HDR photo

The reason I bought my Nikon D70s last year was to take HDR photos. I am just now getting around to it. This is our house.



I used the trial version of Photomatix Pro 3.0 and just removed their watermarks with Corel Paint Shop Pro X. This is probably over processed—colors too saturated and contrast too high, but I'm just playing around. Our house is completely different from the Simpson's house, but the flat, bright colors create a passing resemblance.

The next photo has been processed on some Japanese site to look like an old photo. Maybe a small stagecoach inn, circa 1890? Pretty good job. I used the overexposed photo from the bracketed set that produced the above HDR image. The properly exposed photo was too dark after processing.

How to write telephone numbers

There is actually an international standard for how your contact information appears, including telephone number and email address. It's the ITU-T E.123 Recommendation. This is taken from the text:

Orange flower

Neither my wife nor I remember the name of this flower which we most likely bought at Home Depot or Lowe's. Very intense orange blossoms. It actually looked better yesterday—less blousy—but I was too lazy to get out my camera.



My depth of field was too shallow. Would have been nice to have all of the flower completely in focus.

Yellow garden spider

My wife pointed out this spider to me this afternoon on our front porch. It's commonly called a yellow garden spider, but its latin name is Argiope aurantia. Very pretty colors. Click on the image to see the high-resolution version. The spider looks much more impressive that way.

The rain lilly

In the Texas hill country, rain lillies like these appear a day or so after a heavy rain in the spring and summer.




Their buds are purple, and they flower the same day. The giant rain lilly is slightly larger.

Yellow fungus

Some sort of fungus growing on our shed step after a series of rainy days. The bright golden color caught my eye.

First National Starbuck's

Saw this in Bastrop, Texas a week-and-a-half ago.




Is the bank in a Starbuck's or is the Starbuck's in a bank?

(BTW, "Bastrop" is pronounced, "bass drop," as in a fish fall.)

Texas coast, Christmas 2004

While cleaning up some old email just now, I came across this satellite photo from Christmas 2004 of the Texas coast dusted with snow. Folks, this is an extremely rare thing! Cool photo, too. The upper coast starts at about West Matagorda Bay and goes all the way down the coast into Mexico.

Old rainy day

My wife took this photo a month or so ago of our front porch during a rain storm. I just found it on her camera's memory card. Nice colors!



I corrected some spatial distortion, but now the front chair looks a bit odd. Oh, well. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything.

Night photos

I just bought a remote shutter release for my Nikon D70s. I've needed it before, and I'll need it for the HDR photos I've been meaning to take (that's why I bought the camera). I took a few photos of the night sky to play around with it. None of them are that good, but here are a couple after cropping.



This first one (above) of the moon looks like a grey ball that is illuminated by a flashlight. I couldn't see the dark side of the moon with the naked eye, but it shows up well in the photo. It was windy, so some of the blurriness may be due to slight shaking of the camera. The exposure took around 10 seconds. I increased the contrast a tad to get rid of some of the glare from the cloudy sky. I like the clouds and whatever chromatic aberrations are going on there. It looks like a frame from a silent movie.



This shows the glow over some hills in front of our house. The red light (two, actually) is on an antenna at the nearby fire hall. Depending on your monitor, you may or may not be able to see the silhouette of the trees and what I assume are utility poles on the horizon. I like it like that.