MightyFunk

Words can’t express my admi­ra­tion for the stu­pid­ity of this brave/stupid unfor­tu­nate, god-forsaken soul. I’ll prob­a­bly burn in hell for say­ing this, but I think I stand bet­ter chances than pulling a Lawn­chair Larry…:

SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) — A Roman Catholic priest who floated off under hun­dreds of helium party bal­loons was miss­ing Mon­day off the south­ern coast of Brazil.

Res­cuers in heli­copters and small fish­ing boats were search­ing off the coast of Santa Cata­rina state, where pieces of bal­loons were found.

Hey — I don’t care what floats your boat. Doesn’t bother me one bit. But this is def­i­nitely newsworthy:

Greek islanders: We are the true Les­bians
Trio from Les­bos sues gay rights group, says use of L-word is insulting

By NICHOLAS PAPHITIS
Asso­ci­ated Press
Pub­lished on: 04/30/08 ATHENS, Greece — A Greek court has been asked to draw the line between gay women and the natives of the Aegean Sea island of Lesbos.

Three islanders from Les­bos — home of the ancient poet Sap­pho, who praised love between women — have taken a gay rights group to court for using the word les­bian in its name.

Per­haps the most annoy­ingly use­ful thing ever cre­ated. Too bad I always get them wrong.

This one wasn’t so bad — after three sep­a­rate attempts…

Here I will out­line gear for tak­ing proper HDR (High Dynamic Range) images using the lat­est tech­nolo­gies avail­able. This arti­cle con­cerns HDR pho­tog­ra­phy for inclu­sion within com­puter gen­er­ated, 3D envi­ron­ments and image based lighting.

Cam­eras and Lenses

While any cam­era will basi­cally suf­fice to pro­duce HDR images, I will focus on professionally-targeted cam­eras for the sake of this arti­cle while focus­ing on a medium to high range of bud­get, short of spend­ing $35,000+ on a Spheron cam­era sys­tem. In par­tic­u­lar, I will talk about Canon-based cameras.

The cam­era cri­te­ria I look for in order to pro­duce a good HDR image involves the following:

Years ago, I rolled out a web­site — www.hdrsource.com. It spe­cial­ized in HDR (High Dynamic Range) imag­ing with a sole pur­pose of pro­vid­ing the 3D com­mu­nity with pio­neer­ing meth­ods to light their 3D scenes. I worked hard in devel­op­ing these computer-generated meth­ods to cre­ate these images and 3D envi­ron­ments. Visu­ally, these CG-based images I pro­duced weren’t the most attrac­tive — they’re not some­thing you just want to spend hours (let alone min­utes) admir­ing from an aes­thetic per­spec­tive. Their main intent was sim­ply to light a 3D scene in such a way as to pro­vide a bet­ter, more real­is­tic method to light a scene while pro­vid­ing new con­trols for bal­anc­ing out an image.