Merry Christmas & How it's made

Merry Christmas to everyone! I've created a photo today for this opportunity and thought it would be interesting to share a little tutorial about how to use a simple photographic effect to achieve this result.

The name of the effect is the bokeh. You need to setup the scene in the following way:

As you can see the drawing above, you need a relatively long distance between the camera and the lights (little bulbs, LEDs, whatever) and you have to place the glass close to the camera. You need to setup some soft light to lit the glass. I've used a softbox with a studio flash, but I just needed the model light, not the flash. 

As for the camera, you will need a fast lens, at least f2.8 to have good results and of course a tripod is needed.

Set the focus on the glass and watch the lights on the background and position if necessary. Play a bit with the softbox light intensity to find the right balance on the scene, you will need a bit brighter fill light to avoid the background spots to burn in. Thats all. Easy effect, and no need any graphics work, photoshop..etc. This is a pure photographic trick. Enjoy.

Night photography with iPhone?

It is possible, but of course we should not expect professional photos, though...   I had the idea to write this little tutorial for ones are new to photography or just to show that we can capture some nice photos to our family album even in the night when we left the camera at home. I always saying a nicely captured low quality photo is much better than a missed one.

So the most important is the right timing, as you know the iPhone (and other phones and cheaper point and shoot cameras) are not the kings of the night. So we need to take these photos during the first half of the blue hour to have enough ambient light and colors to capture.

As you may know, there are two blue hours a day, in the morning and in the night. You can find out this time frame at your location using www.bluehoursite.com or the iPhone app, available here. The blue hour effect is stronger during the beginning so try to make the photos early. Later the sky will be too dark for the phone and the little dynamic range will result of burned out light spots, lots of dark areas and high noise.

Noise is the biggest issue with the photos currently. I did not test the iPhone 4S yet, but the iPhone 3G and iPhone 4 has relatively high noise. The iPhone 4 higher resolution helps a bit to reduce this though.

During the capture try to frame the scene as you wish and then tap on the screen to adjust focus and light meter to a relatively darker part to keep the balance on the image. If you taking image of some brighter lights then it may need to tap on this, to prevent burning in. If the lights are too bright you will lose all the details around it.

tap on a darker area before shoot. Sorry for the blur, not easy to hold steady while taking a screen shot :)

According to my experience the white balance and other settings are just right as you take the photo, no adjustments needed. The noise will be high so you may want to reduce it with a noise reduction software. There is an option to this right in iPhoto on Mac, it has a relatively good results. You need to pick some higher values but always check the results and fine tune if needed.

Adjust Sharpness and De-noise sliders.

Results from iPhoto

There are other alternatives, like Noise Ninja (trial, win+mac), NDNoise (free, win+mac), Neat Image (trial, win+mac). These softwares can produce nice results but of course it is not magic. 

untouched, taken with iPhone 4

Good bye Steve, and thanks for everything!

A sad day, this is. I woke up in the morning, grabbed my iPad and started reading the news but it took my breath away immediately when I read the about Steve Jobs. He was one of the biggest mind in the IT industry, a real pirate from the Silicon Valley.

We can thank him a lot of things, not just iPhone and Mac, but the basic fundamentals of the today's computers.

One brand to rule them all

This week when I watched the Keynote event, on the first few minutes I saw an empty chair with a reserved sign in the center of the first line. I noted that who is that person who has a reserved chair in such an event and misses it. Now I know it. I missed Steve from the event, he was the best in these presentations. I enjoyed all of them. I think in the next few days I'll watch previous Keynotes to remember.

We all knew this will happen, Steve was not in a good shape recently but this was way too early.
Rest in peace, Steve Jobs.

Blue Hour Site, behind the scenes

What is all about?

I have a website, it is called Blue Hour Site. This site is able to help by calculating the best time frame for taking stunning blue hour pictures. Blue hour refers to the time after the sun goes below the horizon and the sky goes into deep blue for a while. Below you can see a photo took during this time:

Blue hour at Budapest, Hungary

So where it began?

The idea came in 2008 when I was in Dresden, Germany. It was only a one night stay and I wanted to shoot some blue hour photos. I was not sure about when this time frame starts so during the day I looked for some nice vantage points in the city to get prepared but later that day at the hotel when I realized it is getting dark I did not have enough time to get back to my spots, it was totally dark when I was ready to take the photos. So I missed my one and only opportunity to take some photos there. I was not happy and as a developer I decided to create some code that tells me when blue hour will start on a given day and location. Later I thought more on this idea and got a new idea to create a website to this, it will be a good help to other photographers as well and also we living in the internet era, so why not doing this online.

Later that year I was ready with the website, it was much simpler than the current site, but it already worked well and it was accurate enough to put it online.

I sent the URL to my friends, shared it on web2 sites, wrote about it in photography forums and watched my statistics. More and more visitors came from different part of the world, but the traffic was really low during these weeks/months... I had days with only 1-2 visits.

Transformers - Dark of the Moon (2011)

I always liked the Transformers as an idea and the comic book, cartoon and the movies as well. With today's technology and CG solutions, we can see an amazing quality all across these movies. Personally I liked the first and the latest (this, the third) movie. I don't want to tell anything about the story and to ruin everything if you did not see it yet so just relax and keep reading. I'll only show some screen shots of the movie. Also one interesting and funny thing, the girl wears some high tech high heels, I guess transformers technology. Sometimes it transforms into flats, and then back to high heels. Awesome! Enjoy the screen shots and don't forget to watch this movie, it was a nice two and a half hours.

New Facebook profile page almost ready :)

Buzz Aldrin

Buzz Aldrin with Optimus

Even nicer :) Rosie Huntington-Whiteley from Victora's Secret. Good choice! :)

First try: Windows 8

Microsoft and its Windows 8 is a popular topic in these days. I really like new and intuitive UI and software solutions but I was a bit pessimistic about the screen shots and videos I've seen of the new UI. It is based on the idea Microsoft had about the Phone 7 operating system so lets take a look how this works on a desktop computer.

Okay, so this is how Windows 8 looks after startup. Pretty new and different than we got used to. I'm using a 24" LCD so these tiles looks huge. I can use my computer at the maximum range of my wireless keyboard and mouse... but I don't want to. My first thought about it that a size adjustment would be good... maybe I'll find it somewhere in the options later.

So let's browse the web.

Hmm, our title part with URL field and buttons moved to the bottom... but why? Usually we start reading on the top (where we enter the website address) then looks below to the content, aren't we? This is weird, so weird. I'm curious about the final release that Microsoft will keep this layout or redesign it later. I still not feeling this UI right for a desktop computer.... it is good for a phone or a tablet anyway. I have an iPad so I have experience of using a tablet, and I can imagine this UI in my palm, but not on my desk.

It took me a while to realize how to exit from the browser, I was looking for an X or exit or quit buttons or ways but no luck... then I simply pressed windows button and voila, back to the initial tiles...  great. We can scroll the tiles horizontally using the scroll wheel on the mouse...  It feels a bit weird for the first time (scroll down on the mouse to scroll to the right on the monitor).

Let's try Explorer.

Wow, it jumped to the good and old desktop view. It seems Windows Explorer doesn't have a new UI yet to fit in the tiles layout as Internet Explorer, but Microsoft put the ribbon thing on it. It seems useful on the Explorer, much easier to see the functions compared to the old (hidden) menu layout. I personally don't like the ribbon interface on the Office product line anyway, too complex and it is hard to find functions for a not everyday Office user like me. I simply forget where to find some functions I need and also some frequently used functions need more clicks and navigation to reach. So it seems the Desktop is almost like the same as we get used to on Windows 7, except the start menu part. If we click on it, Windows shows the tiles as you see on the first screen shot.

Control panel looks different to, it fits into the new UI design, looks pretty simple and clear. It seems we need to learn which function is where in Windows 8, as we had to do in Vista, fortunately we can switch back to the old control panel by clicking on the last "More Settings" menu. Using this, Windows switches back to the classic desktop view again.

As a Google Chrome user my first step on an empty system is to install it. I did this on Windows 8 too, it works well but of course in the classic desktop mode only. I'm curious about how the 3rd party browsers and other software will integrate into the new UI later.


Some useful shortcuts to use the new features:

• Win key - switch between the new tiles screen and the running application
• Win key + C - brings up the start menu, as shows some information and clock hover on the screen
• Win key + F - brings up the Search screen side menu
• Win key + Z - brings up the contextual menus for Metro-style apps
• Win key + D - switches to the desktop
• Win key + L - locks the computer and shows the new lock screen
• Win key + P - multi-monitor settings side menu
• Win key + I - brings up the Settings side menu
• Win key + Y - makes all open windows (and the Metro UI) transparent

I'll dig deeper in my follow up posts about Windows 8 in the system, we'll see how it works in the everyday usage.

Let's begin

Okay, so let's start right in the middle. I decided to start this blog as I mostly looking for such types too... so why not writing one rather just reading these..

I'll publish reviews, tests, interesting stuff about IT, cars, photography and anything that comes in my sight and seems good. My English is not perfect, I'm from Hungary, a small place from the eastern side of Europe. This first post was nothing interesting really, just need to start somewhere, right? So let's begin.