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.
HDR images were a fairly new method at the time. Their processing wasn’t even available in more than a few commercial products. Photoshop back then didn’t have the direct capabilities to read HDR imagery. If you did a Google search for HDR images back then, you’d probably come up with a couple hundred results including my website at most. Now when you do a search for HDR images, you pull up over 26,000,000 results.
For HDRSource, I chose to use Paypal as a sales method on the website simply because I didn’t have the time nor expertise to set up a more integrated shopping cart solution. And I was left with little but disappointment in the long-run. I was completely shocked as to how frequently I’d get hit by stolen credit cards. It seemed like every other order was a fake credit card number on a daily basis, and Paypal (or their credit-card processing partners) had a policy in which I’d get charged every time someone went to go make a fake purchase.
It didn’t make much sense to have a shopping cart set up through them any longer. Purchases became more of a nuisance to process than was worthwhile from a profitability perspective. I was on the phone with Paypal representatives on a weekly basis arguing about fraudulent charges and gaining little to no ground. By no means am I slamming Paypal. Over all it is a superb, innovative service for transferring funds from one person to another. However, I do firmly believe they needed to better protect the merchants using their services. Their policies could have changed since then, as technologies and commerce grows by leaps and bounds from year to year.
With all these problems concerning Paypal and fraudulent charges, I pretty much stopped producing new HDR libraries for purchase, and instead redirected focus onto my main architectural rendering company Lunarstudio. HDRSource still gets responses and is indexed fairly well on Google. However, due to these issues with Paypal and other competitors releasing better quality products at the time, I forced myself to take a back seat to marketing these products. In fact, presently I tend to turn people away and steer them to other competitor’s products due to the headaches involved.
So 2008 is now a new year. Lunarstudio has taken off and I have more income to play with some of the latest HDR producing technologies out there. In the next few days I will be looking forward to outlining a new path and methodology concerning HDR creation from photography-based solutions. Hopefully, some of the gear-heads out there will find these articles informative and useful.
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