High Dynamic Range Photography

I’ve been playing with High Dynamic Range photography. This is where you take a bunch of pictures of a scene at different exposures and then make a single shot which has a greater dynamic range. The picture above is just a snap I took last year. I didn’t have three different exposures, so I did some fiddling with the RAW file to fake the different exposure levels. I then used program called PhotoMatix to combine them and then tone map to get the grungy effect that you see above. If you look closely at the picture you’ll see that it has a Photomatix watermark which means I’ve not paid for the software yet. However, I’m very tempted to, as the results seem quite nice to me. Not particularly photorealistic in this shot, but definitely interesting.

If you are into photography you might find it fun to have a go. The only thing you really need is a tripod to keep your camera steady between the different exposures.

PS Vita Fun and Games

The picture doesn’t do justice to the 5 inch screen on the Vita, but it does show you just how large the device is.

I wasn’t going to buy a Vita until I saw one running a game. I’d been lulled by iPads and Smartphones into thinking that they were the ultimate in portable gaming.

They aren’t.

The Vita is a proper, high performance, gaming platform that you just happen to be able to fit into your jacket pocket. The games look like PS3 or Xbox 360 games. Playing Uncharted (as I have been doing) on the Vita is just like playing it on the PS3. What’s more, with twin joysticks in exactly the right places, the control is like using the PS3 gamepad as well. It should have at least three hours of battery life too, which is lot more than you will get from a Smartphone if you start playing 3D games with it.

I am very impressed with the gaming experience. I’m also impressed by the other programs on the device. The browser is perfectly serviceable and the on-screen keyboard is one of the best I’ve used. You can also use it for Skype, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr should you be the sociable type. If they put Amazon Kindle on it I’d be happy to leave the iPad at home and take the Vita with me on trips.

There are some niggles. The use of highly expensive, Sony proprietary, memory cards is a pain and the games are closer to console prices than I’d like. And the device itself is a bit pricey. although that might change over time.

If you are a “proper” gamer who wants to take a “proper” gaming experience with them on the bus then the Vita is a very attractive proposition.

Open Day

These are some of the open day attendees. I’ll settle for “Mostly Happy”.

We had another Open Day today. Good attendance for a mid-week session, which was nice. There was even a chap there who had got hold of my yellow book, written some games and made money out of them. Can’t be bad.

This is the winner of the prize draw, accepting her prize from Warren.

Micro Framework Robots at Tech Days

Straight after my complete “demo meltdown” last week I was greatly cheered by some robots that one of the chaps at Tech Days was showing off. He had taken a toy robot and make it properly useful by adding potentiometers to the joints so that the .NET Micro Framework controller could properly position the arm.

These are the GHI controller boards that he built up.

He even had a demo where the robot was controlled by someone in front of a Kinect sensor. And his worked…..

Reaching for XNA

We came across this issue in the lecture this afternoon. If you are using a machine which lacks really high performance graphics, perhaps because it has an on-board graphics display, you might get an error when you try to run an XNA program on it, because the graphics hardware can’t keep up.

If this happens you can try changing the Game Profile in the project settings for the game. If you set them to “Reach” this will reduce the demands that are made on the machine, and might make the game work.

It worked for me in the lecture….