What a fun place! I can’t believe we’ve never been there after so many years of living in the area. The kids and I had a blast. And I managed to take some great shots of water falls. Check out more pictures in the family section.
Arduino Glow Buddy Project
August 15th, 2010
I’ve been wanting to experiment with Arduino’s for a long time. They are little micro controllers that are easily programmed and able to perform many tasks and projects. The first project I decided to take on was to make a home brew Glow Buddy. We’ve had a couple and they always broke, so I wanted to see if I could build one. To make it even better, I decided two add two RGB Leds, not just one. I ended up using two ShiftBrites and a push button to select various color schemes including a random mood light scheme. I ordered everything from AdaFruit, great customer service! The case is a carboard box used for storing 5″x7″ pictures and I used two ping pong balls as the LED diffusers.
Check it out:
The code is here:
First attempt at HDR Photography
March 31st, 2010
The Macupdate bundle included Hydra, an HDR plugin for Aperture and I decided to buy it. It works great!!! I had take a shot of downtown San Francisco a couple of years ago with a tripod and with a few different exposures. Not one of the 3 shots looked that good, but combined in HDR, they look amazing. Check it out:
You can also see in the same version of this Picture created with a trial version of Photomatix here. It does not look anywhere near as nice. Both were using default settings. Hydra wins in my opinion. Next, I’m going to try using a single Raw image to see what results that gives.






