Digital Formula - Technical » Non Technical

Mt Lowry Challenge 2010 – Mountain running photography

chris — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 05:43:21 +0000

Last weekend I headed out into the rain and photographed the Mt Lowry Challenge 2010, a mountain running race held in Eastbourne near Wellington each year. It’s a choice of a 9km race which seems to be contested by some ridiculously quick people or the ‘extreme’ event, a 22km race that starts up the same hellish climb before splitting off along a different section of the ridge track.

It was a fun day despite the weather and I got to put my new lens through its paces – Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 VR II for those that want technical details.

Photos of the race can be found in the Mt Lowry Challenge 2010 set on Flickr.

HDR photography round 2

chris — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 07:42:38 +0000

I’ve been getting into this HDR photography thing over the last couple of days. I read an article that gave really good information on the setting to use when creating HDR composite shots and it also mentioned that there’s no reason why HDR composites can’t be made from a single RAW image. If you think about it that’s 100% correct too because all you need to do is create the bracketed exposures yourself instead of in-camera while out in the field (or wherever you are taking your shots).

There are a ton of articles around that say how to do this and they’re all different so I won’t bother repeating a tutorial here. Instead, I’ve put a few of my HDR shots up on Flickr page, Digital Formula on Flickr.

The first image in that set (Oriental Bay, Wellington) is a bracketed set of 9 frames but the Venice frames are all single RAW frames that I’ve altered using Adobe Lightroom so that they cover an exposure range of +/- 4EV – that’s heaps.

Anyway, if anyone hits this page and likes the images please feel free to become a fan of my Facebook page, Digital Formula on Facebook. Enjoy!

Photographic Event-a-licious

chris — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:16:53 +0000

Over the past few weeks I’ve been out and about, camera in hand, photographing sports events that have been held in and around Wellington. For now the photos are up on my Flickr page – just use the links below …

As I increase the collection of images that I think are worthy of sharing I’ll be posting updates all over the web (haha). Be sure to follow me on twitter, subscribe to my RSS feed or become a fan on Facebook. Or, if you want to check out all the photos I’ve put online so far, check out Digital Formula on Flickr.

Jack Bauer takes victory in well under 24 hours

chris — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 10:06:41 +0000

Yes, I’m a 24 fan. Today was awful … well, awful in the sense that it was windy, raining, comparatively cold and not the best conditions for cycling.

However, stage 5 of the Trust House Cycle Classic was scheduled for January 31st 2010 around the streets of Wellington and it almost went ahead as planned. The original schedule was to be a 60 minute race around a closed criterium circuit + a 3 lap dash after the completion of 60 minutes racing. Due to the weather however, the race was shortened to only 30 minutes + the 3 lap dash at the end to sort the racers from the coat-tailers.

I decided a few weeks ago to put together my gear and head out to take some shots of the race. I took a few and have put a select few on flickr in an album simply called Trust House Cycle Classic, Stage 5. The gallery below contains the same shots as the flickr set but I’m putting them up here anyway – hope you enjoy them.

[View with PicLens]

Playing with HDR Photography

chris — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:00:35 +0000

It’s been a while since I put anything on this site that isn’t of a technical nature so I thought I’d throw something photography-related up here. Today’s non-technical article is about HDR photography, i.e. the practice of combining multiple exposures to create a single high dynamic range or HDR image. Here’s what I came up with.

Before I start, I’ll just say that this is just playing about with HDR – an actual attempt would probably produce much better results.

To make the images in this post I used a tripod-mounted Nikon D300 digital SLR camera w/ remote shutter release. Although you *can* take the exposures necessary for HDR by hand-holding your camera it’s not recommended because all exposures must be of the same scene if you want to get the best results. A digital SLR camera or compact with the ability to control both shutter speed and aperture is required. The aperture must be set the same for all exposures to prevent parts of scene becoming ‘blurred’ due to depth-of-field changes. The ability to control shutter speed is necessary as HDR photography requires you to bracket your exposures, usually by +/- 2 stops. In case you don’t want to read the Wikipedia article linked to just there, bracketing is taking a ‘master’ exposure and (usually) adjusting the shutter speed up and down a certain number of stops so that you have a set of shots of the same scene but with a range of varying shutter speeds.

A typical bracketing sequence with the shutter speed being adjusted by 1 stop each time might be like this (note that the aperture doesn’t change). The ordering of these shots is irrelevant – it’s the order my camera is set to though.

1/125 f/4.5 – the ‘master’ image, correctly exposed
1/60 f/4.5 (-1 full stop)
1/80 f/4.5 (-2/3 stop)
1/100 f/4.5 (-1/3 stop)
1/160 f/4.5 (+1/3 stop)
1/200 f/4.5 (+2/3 stop)
1/250 f/4.5 (+1 stop)

With those shots taken it was a case of loading them into Photomatix Pro, a trial version of which can be downloaded from HDRsoft. The tone-mapping preferences are very much user- and image-specific so I won’t list them here. The HDRsoft team has made a couple of good tutorials available to get you started if you’ve never used Photomatix Pro before.

Here is one of the exposures in my set without any post-processing being done. I shoot RAW and obviously this shot could be cleaned up and improved a lot by using ACR, Lightroom or whatever your RAW-processing software of choice happens to be. I use Phase One’s excellent Capture One.

And here is the same scene but as an HDR composite made up of 7 bracketed frames (the file is ~1.2MB, sorry). The colour of the water and the detail in the clouds are pretty crazy I reckon …

I’ve got the same 2 images combined into a single image so they can be seen side-by-side too – it’s available on Flickr for those interested in seeing it.

Obviously scene choice plays a big part in how well an HDR image comes out but it’s still good fun.

Digital Formula Downloads

chris — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 03:56:22 +0000

Recently I added a new page to Digital Formula simply called ‘Downloads‘. The name should be self-explanatory; it’s a page I’m going to use as a single location for all files/source code/applications that I think are worth downloading.

All new downloads will be put there and I will be slowly going through older downloads and files so that their content can be added to the Downloads page, if appropriate. The downloads page will also have some files that aren’t directly referenced by any Digital Formula articles although this will be rare.

Russian forum comment spam from 89.185.88.241 and 89.185.88.237

chris — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 03:44:34 +0000

I checked my site’s spam queue today and found that I suddenly had 10 comments that were identified as spam by the WordPress plugin Akismet (this sites uses the WordPress blogging engine, the best blogging engine available in my opinion). Here are the details of the comments …

For a start, they were all in Russian and were all from the same IP address range. My particular comments all originated from 1 of 2 IP addresses:

89.185.88.241
89.185.88.237

I had a bit of a WTF moment too seeing as 2 of the comments accused me of stealing content written on other websites and publishing it as my own.

It’s also particularly frustrating considering Digital Formula makes use of a Captcha plugin to try and eliminate bot comment spam.

A quick Google search found quite a few pages that all but confirm that the comments are in fact spam even though a couple of them appeared to be genuine comments saying good things about the articles’ content. I used Google Translate to read the comments seeing as my ability to translate Russian is completely nonexistent.

This link relates directly to one of the addresses I was getting comments from …

http://www.stopforumspam.com/ipcheck/89.185.88.237

… and this link relates to another IP address in the same range that is also suspected of doing spammy stuff.

http://projecthoneypot.org/ip_89.185.89.23

Here’s a link to a screenshot of how come of the comments looked in the WordPress admin screen.

Might be an idea to watch out for these addresses as spam originators …

The Tweet to beat … get paid to Tweet

chris — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 05:47:23 +0000

On Twitter I follow Tim Ferriss, author of the world-famous book “The Four Hour Work Week“. He’s running a charity promo at the moment where, if you start to follow him on Twitter, he will donate $1 to DonorsChoose.org. For each $1 donation another anonymous party will donate $2 to the same charity, making a total of $3 for each person that follows Tim on Twitter. I reckon this is a great way of donating money without having to do ANYTHING. Check it out by going to http://bit.ly/DUQza.

Why aren’t our systems setup properly?

chris — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 12:54:06 +0000

In my line of work I’ve had to come into a number of different companies and take up roles as the newest member of the technical team. Sometimes I’ve had to take roles that are junior to existing staff members until I prove myself and other times I’ve taken up roles where I’ve been the senior guy from the word go.

No matter what my role is there is inevitably something in the existing configuration that makes me go WTF? “Didn’t the last admin know what they were doing?” Let me give you some examples of weird things I’ve found so far.

A mail server with a DHCP-configured network adapter. The existing administrators were wondering why their mail server would sometimes not respond.
A Microsoft Active Directory where Domain Users was part of the Domain Admins group.
A Microsoft Active Directory where the CEO was a member of Enterprise Admins.
An ‘administrator’ wondering why users couldn’t access any files. I found that he’d denied access to all files by granting his account and ONLY his account access to the files in question.
A network folder containing payroll information being open to every person in the organisation.
Testing a new configuration in the production environment and then wondering why things aren’t working anymore.

It’s things like this that make me wonder how some people get jobs as system administrators. My experience is almost entirely Microsoft-based so I know a thing or two about how to configure Active Directory and the bits that go with it. I’ve asked myself why this sort of thing happen and I’ve come up with a couple of theories. In all the points below I’m referring to ‘we’ as the collective technical population – don’t take any of it personally.

We simply don’t care.

As ‘geeks’ we go to great lengths to make sure our home systems are configured properly, secure and don’t cause us any undue grief. Yes I know there are exceptions to this because we love tinkering and we eventually break something that forces a rebuild … damn, where’s my Windows XP DVD?

Why, then, don’t we apply the same level of dedication to the configurations we’re responsible for in our corporate environments every day?

A Microsoft Tech-Ed a couple of years ago, Steve Riley, arguably one of if not Microsoft’s top security guru, posed a similar question to the audience. My answer was simply that we don’t own the networks and in most cases we have nothing to lose if they stop working. For this reason we can afford to slack off a bit without causing too much trouble.

In other words, it’s simple social engineering that causes us to care at home but not at work.

I worked with a guy a while ago who had his home system locked down so tight that he locked himself out … oh the joys of not knowing how to configure iptables properly. Unfortunately his work ethic left a bit to be desired and he ended up being the guy responsible for point #6 above.

We think we’re good at what we do …

… but we aren’t. If a company hires someone that doesn’t know what they’re doing it can cause absolute havoc. I mean, how many times have you talked to someone in a technical role that’s responsible for a corporate system and then found they have no idea what they’re talking about?

I’ve been involved in the hiring process many times throughout my career and it’s shocking how many people embellish their CV to the point of sounding like they could take Ed Harris’s place in the movie ‘Apollo 13’ – they make it look like they’re good enough to work for N.A.S.A. All too often this ends up coming around full circle and they do something silly that makes their CV look like 5 or 6 pages of rubbish.

Don’t get me wrong, nobody is perfect. If you know how to do something and you’re good at it – GREAT. If you really don’t understand something then please have the guts to admit it or at least go away and research it before saying you’re the authority on the topic. I certainly write about things that I’m not the authority on … hopefully I don’t sound like I think I am though.

If we deserve to get paid ‘the big bucks’ shouldn’t we all be aware of what we do and don’t know?

What do YOU think?

London – The Result

chris — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:34:48 +0000

So, after emailing, calling and generally harassing probably well over 100 companies and recruitments agencies, we’ve decided to call it quits. Companies in London are seriously opposed to sponsoring work permits, something I need in order to work here (I’m writing this while still in London).

So where to next? We’ve got a couple of ideas but we’ve narrowed things down to either Australia or Singapore – we’ve got excellent opportunities in both places at the moment which is really encouraging after over a month of constantly being told there’s nothing people can do. To be fair, not everyone has been cold and blunt about it and I’ve been in contact with a number of recruiters who have been really sympathetic and helpful which was really nice.

As I said ages ago, I’ll write another appropriate post when the status of things change and there’s news worth relating.