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I hacked on my HDR pipeline. What I have now provides some automation but it's still really fragile and generally ugly. Nevertheless, I can now process a few gigabytes of pictures without clicking like crazy until I get RSI.

The first part was to automatically combine multiple exposure into HDR images. Discovering which pictures are multiple exposure of the same scene is theoretically quite easy. All the exif tags should be the same except for the exposure, which should be decreasing, and the time spawn of all the pictures should be no more than exposure time plus shutter lag. It gets complicated when you add the fact that my camera sometimes implements bracketing by decreasing ISO sensitivity instead of shortening the exposure time. That and PIL's miserable support for exif.

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Back from Québec City where I visited my brother's brand new child, Charlie Gingras.

Thanks to the convenient location of the bus station, I had the occasion the take a few pictures of the Vieux-Québec.

This is my first serious panorama. I scanned the scene in program shift mode, compute the average exposure and shot with brackets in full manual mode. I aligned the images with autopano-sift, stitched with hugin, blended with enblend, tone mapped with qtpfsgui, and post processed with the Gimp. Be sure to have a look that the full size version before you decide if you like it or not.

I don't know how to get rid of the stitching lines in the sky; maybe I should just replace it with a gradient. I'm satisfied with the post processing but I have a lot of work to do on composition. Not too bad for a first attempt.

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After many passionate conversations about photography with Pascal, I decided to upgrade my digital camera. I didn't feel quite ready, technically and financially, for the full power of DSLR but I definitely wanted to try my hands on the expressiveness of manual mode. I retired my Nikon L10 and I'm now the proud owner of a Sony H9.

It features a huge LCD and given it's zooming power, it's quite lite. It also has a bunch of manual controls. One thing that I really wanted was bracketing. I had tried to do HDR with my L10 but you need to fiddle with the control dial to change the exposure. There is no way you can to that without moving the camera and the slightest movement will ruin a HDR image; all my previous attempts where just a bunch of splotchy messes. Now, at last, I can do it. I mean, it just works, and the result is... Wow!

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