When I first saw this image my first thought was that the image was awesome. Very lucky timing and location with the taking of that picture. In the image, the sky is actually not on fire, but it is just some lucky light refraction in the clouds at a concert from the sunset.
My second thought was that the image looks a lot like when the Doctor ignites the sky to prevent the evil Sontarans from taking over in the Doctor Who episode “The Poison Sky“. An image of when that happens can be seen here.
About a week or two ago, I broke down and bought the Pro HDR iPhone application.
Why did I buy it? I bought the application because the HDR functionality in iOS 4.1 is not able to be used on an iPhone 3GS which I happen to have and because in some situations, HDR can actually turn out a pretty good, looking image. Sometimes HDR images are just blown away, surrealistic images, but sometimes they can lead to good images.
The use of the application is quite easy. On start-up you are prompted with creating an “Auto HDR”, “Manual HDR”, or a “Library HDR”. Auto HDR is where the applications figures which exposures would be best to use to create a HDR of the scene before you. Manual HDR is where you the user selects the dark and light points in the image to create a HDR. Library HDR creates a HDR off of images you have already taken with your camera at a previous point.
Overall, the application works quite nicely. There are some instances where the image obviously looks modified by HDR, but some instances the image looks quite nice. The Auto HDR function does take a bit longer to run as the application iterates through all the exposure options for the device’s camera where as the Manual HDR just takes two taps and two button clicks to create the image. In reality it is like six to eight seconds for the Auto HDR to run and about four seconds for the Manual HDR to run.
Below is one of my favorite “HDR” images I have created thus far. You can view all my other HDR videos on my Flickr account here.
I was reading my RSS feeds and came upon one which featured a nifty, simple site that surveyed people about what they could remember about your website from just a quick glance at it. The website’s name is Clue and requires no registration to use it.
To use it, simply type in the URL of the site you’d like test visitor’s memories on and send them to link Clue gives back. When a visitor takes the survey, they will view the website for five and a half seconds, and then will be asked to enter several terms or ideas that stood out to them (i.e. things that they would remember if they had to describe the site to someone else). It is very easy and is quite practical to the world of web design and development.
So, if you’re interested in taking a memory test on my site, you can click here to do that.
If you want to view the results, you can click here.
