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.