Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Ars Electronica Festival 2007

"Goodbye Privacy"
Image: Seeker
Leon Cmielewski, Josephine Starrs (AU)
Award of Distinction Interactive Art
(c) the Ars Electronica Picture Archive

Quoting the Ars Electronica website, this year's "[...] focus will be on these late-breaking phenomena of a new culture of everyday life being played out between angst-inducing scenarios of seamless surveillance and the zest we bring to staging our public personas via digital media".

The festival is taking place from 5. to 11. September 2007 in Linz, Austria (see program and content). A detailed schedule is also available.

I will visit the festival and the exhibition to capture some immersive images of the festival's atmosphere.

Monday, August 27, 2007

Subway Extension Vienna


Work in progress updated: Donaukanal/Schottenring March 2007
Technical information:
  • 3 bracketed shots (Fuji S3 extended range) merged to HDR with PTGui Pro and saved as Radiance (.hdr) files.
  • Photoreceptor tonemapping to 8bit TIFF with Picturenaut
  • Further postprocessing with Gimp: Local contrast enhancement, color normalisation and sharpening

Sunday, August 26, 2007

2 extreme hobbies...

Extreme ironing - captured by extreme underwater panography

Captured by guruguru360.com
See an image of his setup

Microsoft HDView and Dynamic Range Adaption

The new beta 2 of HView offers an interesting feature: "Auto Tone Adjust"
It is some sort of dynamic range adaption - a feature highly anticipated by panorama photographers. Instead of pre-computing the best visual appearance for the whole image, you can let the viewer calculate the appearance on the fly.
If you already use HDView on your webpage, this feature is automatically added to your published content - no need to edit or re-publish.

Some interesting uses of this feature:

3 different types of adjustment are available. You can toggle these types by clicking a button in the upper right window of the viewer:

No tone adjust: leaves image as it is


Medium tone adjust: enhanced contrast


High tone adjust: enhanced contrast and colors



You can set the default tone adjust method by adding a parameter to the XML call in your HTML page, e.g.

args =
'FileName=control.xml&BackgroundColor=0&ToneMode=1'
will change to medium tone adjust setting.

Some caveats:
  • HDView beta 2 still works exclusively with LDR images. Although the new HDPhoto-format can deal with HDR images, HDView can't display them (this may be adressed in one of the next beta versions of HDView).

  • Tone adjustment seems to be calculated on a per-tile base. This can clip small distinct features. Images that consist of one tile (e.g. a single jpeg image viewed with HDView) won't be adjusted at all.

  • Large featureless areas can lead to clipping colors in "high" mode, e.g. a view window with large amount of sky may expose weird colors.


Compare the visual appearance with a standard viewer:

Zoomify version
Microsoft HDView version no tone adjust
Microsoft HDView version medium tone adjust
Microsoft HDView version hight tone adjust

Saturday, August 25, 2007

New panorama uploaded to hdview.at

Another high resolution panorama by Wolfgang Stich:
Grossglockner Pasterze Glacier

Click the thumbnail to open the panorama.
The original 1.2 Gigapixel image was resized to 665 Megapixel.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Easily integrate Google Maps in your webpage

You can now integrate a Google Map into your website without custom programming via Maps API. Just create the needed code via "Create Link" and paste it into your own HTML code.


Larger view of the map

Now i only have to find out, how to set the properties for this iframe to open links in the parent window...