I’m still experimenting my the D80. I’ve just discovered the bracketing feature, allowing you to take multiple photos of the same subject with different exposures, successively. Consequently, here is my first try at HDRI (High Dynamic Range Imaging):

To get to the final result here above, which contains details for both the sky (sun and clouds) and the foreground (house), I used three images with different exposures, from short to long (dark to light):

The dark image contains details in the sky but displays a dark house, whilst the light image shows details for the house but presents a “burned out” sky. Those three pictures were then combined in The Gimp using the exposure blend plugin.

The present image isn’t very exciting but gives a good idea of the results you can achieve with this plugin. I’ll publish more interesting results in the future.

I borrowed my father’s Nikon D80 for a few days to play with… And until now, I must say I’m quite impressed with the beast!!! I was used to my small Sony DSC-W5: a compact model which can’t physically perform like a DSLR type camera.

I find terribly amazing the possibility to play with the aperture, the manual focus and other features which are really missing on compact models and which allow you for example to get a fuzzy background. Moreover, my father is using a 18-200 lens which features a wide angle as well as a huge zoom…but this king of lens is lengthy though. Here are some pictures I took so far:

Now I’m really tempted to get one myself… the question is: the D40x or the new D60?

Two weeks ago, we were watching a nice DVD my girlfriend and I, when suddenly, a terrible noise and a flash occurred, followed by a total blackout…

I first thought: “oh my god, my TV just exploded!”. But after having put the breaker back on, I realized it wasn’t my TV the faulty part, but my cheap DVD player. I could even see some smoke going out of the poor guy… Since it wasn’t pretty new nor expensive, I wasn’t more worried about the player than the DVD inside!

A screwdriver helped me to get the disc out of the dead player, and it was playing back some minutes after in my laptop… no way we had to miss the end of the movie!

Nevertheless, the laptop was only a backup solution, and I recently bought a new (and cheap – 40€) DVD player to replace the broken one. I got one featuring USB and SD inputs (very nice to put an external drive and read from it) and HDMI output (not really necessary since my TV isn’t HD at all… but hey, why spitting on it?). And of course it reads plenty of formats. Here is the new beast: