Lightning Photography with hacked Canons

I just learned about CHDK projekt [modified Canon firmware] which apperently offers such things as motion detection triggered  lightning photography.
You ever has tried lightning photography knows how difficult that is. The most practical approach these days would be a HD-quality movie with subsequent still extraction.
 The Canon hacked firmware projects goes a different path: Motion as trigger event is supposedly fast enough to catch actual thunderstorm lightnings.
My Powershot Pro90 IS is unfortunately not on the list. If you have had any success with this or know some pictures taken this way, post a comment, please.

Donate your CPU Power !

Grid and cloud computing are the industries buzz words these days. But here is a practical, actionable opportunity for everybody to do something really useful:

Free Download  your desktop Grid software here.

Donate your (spare) CPU power of your PC (MAC, Windows, Linux, even PS3s ) for serious academic research.
You might support biochemical research for 3D structures of proteines (which might and will lead to a better understanding of the "mechanics" of life and thus the development of new medicine.
You might chose to support the search for extraterrestral life forms or their signals (SETI @ home), you might also chose a project for better weather forecasts with the benefit of earlier desater alerts and many more.
You can chose the project you like, and switch after some time to give some CPU power to somebody else.

All this is completely voluntary and "free" in the sense that only unused otherwise "wasted" CPU power is used. Modern PCs have a huge reserve in maximem CPU power which is fully used only in a fraction of the usage time.
"Screen savers" are typically purely cosmetic and otherwise useless programs to make some use of this untapped CPU time.
BOINC  http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ 
makes use of thousands  better millions of PCs running worlduwide. Download the 7MB academic screensaver and start making some "CPU time" donations today.

This image from a BOINC project display structures at the mars south pole.

Cruise ship safety - no risk no fun

Monster waves had been a long believed myth topic but they are a physical reality - sparse but real.
The recent hazard on the cypric cuise ship "Louis Majesty" is such a reminder.
2 people died as a short triple high wave phenomenon called the "3 sisters" hit deck 5 and burst windows.
The ship and most other passengers did not suffer any further damage and continued safely to Barcelona for repair and passenger swap for the next 14 day "unforgettable dream vacation".

                                Image is screencapture from Youtube movie
Unlike the cuise ship Voyager 5 years ago. Again the calm mediterranean sea, again in February/March - Voyager was bound to Barcelona from Tunisia. It came across the Winter storm Valentina when a monster wave crashed into the bridge (!) and cut off the electronics for engine control.
Loss of engine control then was the main problem as Voyager was helpless literally a bobbing cork on the water. (watch the full Youtube clip to relive and imagine this cruise ship experience for those 780 passengers).
Risk of capsizing is immanent when you cannot turn a ship "into the wind" facing the waves and riding the swell because the ship tends to turn sideways so that wind and swell increase the torsional moment.
Voyager experienced peak bank angles of up to 40-50 degrees far beyond the "comfort zone".
You may - or may not - remember that this horror cruise experience finally had a good ending as well - mechanics managed ultimately to repair the engine control at least partially.

Does this now constitute a warning to "avoid" cruise ship tours alltogether?  How great is the real risk?

The clear - yet totally personal and subjective - answer is no. Apart from unsolved Bermuda triangle mysteries there are no major mass catastrophies yet accountable to monster waves. "Kafrenzmänner" as monster waves are called in German seamen circles are a physical fact but are extremely seldom phenomena.
"At sea and at court you are in God´s hands"
The luxury of contemporary cruise ships should never obscure the fact that we are placing ourselves at sea in the domain of physical forces of extreme power that we cannot fully control.
There is no prediction mechanism or algorithm in sight that could "pre-warn" ships from monster waves - and they can occor in otherwise calm environments, so even enourmous progress in weather forecasting, radar, GPS etc. is no total insurence.
What remains is the simple insight that the beauty and marvellous experience of a cruise ship extravanganza is never without risk - with notable emphasis on the fact that the most risky parts of a cruise ship tour are the flight transfer to the departing port and even more - believe it or not - the car transfer to the airport!

Bigger is always better

Big screen TV has reached new dimensions - ready for the HD-launch in Germany.

Finally - starting with the Vancouver Winter Games - ARD and ZDF the primary federal German free TV channels start their HD broadcast. on Feb. 12th.
No more showcases, instead a 24/7 regular HD-broadcast, however only in 720p and from the beginning not fully charged with true HD-content. A lot will be upscaled material in the beginning.

The Epson TW2900 used here to produce an 110" image has been tested very favorably by the leading ct magazine based in Hannover. I thought about plasma, but finally stayed with a beamer only upgrading the older SD-model with the full-HD Epson. 

Now, this makes for 5 total free HD stations in Germany in February;

 ARD-HD, ZDF-HD, arte-HD, Anixe-HD and a less relevant austrian channel called "ServusTV".

It will be interesting to what extent private channels will succeed with their attempt to enter digital addressability and even more important a pay-TV status by means of their HD+ engagemement.

Skeptics predict that only a few hundred thousand  users will watch the encrypted HD+ channels by end of 2010! Instead quotas of public channels may go up due to free access to HD.

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It must be mentioned however, that all this public channel generositiy for free HD comes at a price - "GEZ" is basically state-regulated mandatory pay-TV - the true reason why Premiere and Sky have not succeeded to reach a customer base anywhere close to the penetration that is possible in the UK or Italy.

Is your RED better than my RED - How much red ist red enough?

Theory and practice of color management - and why we should switch our cameras to produce more and better colors.

I want to share my recent insights here on the need of monitor calibration and the end of the dominant ruling of the "sRGB" color space.
sRGB has ever since been the primary "least common denominator" for camera-produced JPGs and regular monitors, at the same time it is one of the most limited color spaces which means that proactive limitation to this space cuts away all of the possible quality that a raw image could and most middle class cameras contain. Quality printers have long shown a wider color space in green and blue shades than sRGB and more recently high color WCG (Wide color Gamut) monitors are becoming affordable.

Try out for yourself what I am talking about:

This red square  [1] is 100% red with RGB values of 255 - 0 - 0

It is the "reddest" red that can be coded within a JPG file without any reference to a specific color space. In practice this is invariably be interpreted as "sRGB" -  ONLY sRGB-Red , which is the reddest red within the very limited sRGB color space. It is by far not the reddest red that a human can perceive and experience.
Adobe Lightroom takes care of this fact by transforming this 100% sRGB red into its own much wider ProPhoto color space and treats this color internally as 75% Red, 34% Green(!) and 13,7% Blue (!).
When this very picture is then being exported as an AdobeRGB JPG file, it is encoded with values 218 - 0 - 0 which reflects the fact that Adobe RGB can display and encode a much redder red than sRGB and consequently sRGB-red cannot occupy the "100%" coding value of 255 in this scale.
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The red square below [2]  is again 100% sRGB-red in an Adobe RGB JPG file encoded as 218 - 0 -0

Now two interesting effects take place.

In most cases you (the reader) will have an sRGB monitor and this red field [2] and the one above [1] should look totally identical. If they don´t and [2] looks even a bit "darker" than the first it means that your browser does not interpret the color space of the file and does not transform it correctly into your monitor sRGB space.  [Firefox should do, IE, Opera and Google Chrome don´t as of now]
You may download the two files (right-click->save as) and try to open them in differnent picture viewers or graphics programs. You may and will find that some programs show the files with identical looks (correct) and others like Windows Paint don´t. Some picture viewers behave differently depending on window or full screen mode.
They should always look identical - if they don´t its your software that is imperfect.

If you are in the lucky position to possess a High Color Monitor .e. one of the recent WCG [Wide Color Gamut] models like
            DELL UltraSharp 2709W or U2410
            EIZO FlexScan S2433W
            HP 2475w or LP2480
            LG Flatron W2220 or W2420
you should still see the above red fields also as identical but you will principally be able to see a  truely much redder red if an Adobe RGB file ist encoded with it´s maximum values of 255 - 0 - 0.  Such a color outside of the sRGB space is "out of range" for most of us which means that photos may lose a bit of detail as the color shades are "clipped" to the closest match for all regular sRGB viewers.
The following three examples can therefore ONLY be appreciated by high color WCG monitor viewers. All others will not notice any difference.

This red sqare above [3]  is an EXTREME RED with 95% red, 7.1% green and 5% blue in the large ProPhoto space. It is exported with reference to "ProPhoto" and coded with 240 - 15 - 13 RGB values, which means that relative to the very large ProPhoto space this red is still not the absolute maximum reddest red ever possible, but it is close!

The next example below [4] shows this same EXTREME RED (95% ProPhoto -Red) exported as Adobe RGB JPG.
Adobe RGB does actually not contain this level of red so it is clipped to 254 - 0- 0 in Adobe RGB.

In other words the field above is "100% Adobe RGB red" the reddest red achievable in the Adobe RGB space. On a monitor cabable of Adobe RGB this should be obvious by the fact that this field [4] are much redder that the sRGB ones at the top of this post.[1] and [2]. If the monitor can even go beyond Adobe RGB then [3] will visibly be even redder than [4].

Finally this extremely burning red (95% ProPhoto-Red) is being exported within an sRGB-JPG file [5].

The coding is again 254 - 0 - 0 [actually a JPG compression artefact, it should be 255 instead of 254] which means that the relatively faint sRGB-red is used as a "best effort" attempt to mimic the true burning red that the picture originally contained. This ist what reguarly happens within every camera which uses the default setting of "sRGB" for JPG production.
On a wide color monitor you will see and notice what you lost as [5] is downconverted to match again the extremely limited sRGB space.
Everybody else will notice no difference between [1] [4] and [5] and may even perceive [2] and [3] as somewhat more "faint" than the others although [2] is actually regular sRGB red (like [1]) and [3] is actually the reddest most glowing red field in this whole posting.

What is now the final conclusion of this confusing scenario:

• More color is always better!
• High color monitors will become affordable and will spread widely within the coming years.
• Consequently WE ALL should stop to limit ourselves to the least common denominator and overcome the dictate of the "sRGB paradigm".
• We must begin to fill our photo archives with high color quality content.

At least WE (the (Semi) Pro´s ) should SWITCH our cameras to at least Adobe RGB and/or export our Raw-Images in no less than Adobe-RGB from now on.
We should be the front-line of quality producers and accept and ignore the fact that laggard sRGB viewers with erratic software setups may even critizise our photos as "faint".
It´s a chicken/egg problem - content drives the industry to improve - similar to the video/broadcast industry - everybody is now producing in HD - although the majority of viewers is still using SD-equipment.
So finally, if you are still not convinced - then switch to raw photography now or (concurrent raw/jpg) and KEEP your RAWS. Storage has become cheap and your RAWS have the capability to be exported to higher color space JPGs with minimal effort once my prediction has become an obvious reality.

PS: Bookmark this article and use it in a store if you want to buy a new monitor - it will open your eyes!
       

Hubble dwarfes mankind (again)

Hubble´s - so far - deepest ever look into the universe reveals myriads of unseen galaxies.
More of those fantastic astronomical pictures can be found at Space Telescope Sciene Institute´s Website

These very early galaxies - about only 600 Mio. years after big bang - represent the deepest view and oldest items in the universe ever seen by mankind.

In photographic terms exposure time was 48hours - (taken in late August 2009). Camera Model WFC3/IIR

(Wide Field Camera 3 - near Infrared). Image dimension is 144 arc seconds which is equivalent of 50.134 mm focal lenght hyper zoom (SLR FX 35mm sensor).

This means essentially - "don´t try this at home"  and underlines the sensational character of these images.

Color is actually a digital artefact created by assigning specific colors to overlays of multiple filtered (grayscale) images representing different frequency ranges in the infrared spectrum.

More recent photo examples from Hubble

Said and done - the trees are gone!

After a full week of unshadowed operation is has becoome clear that solar energy is not always as "green" as everybody thinks. Shadow of any kind - even a tiny patch reduces the efficiency so dramatically that every effort to get the panel surface shadow-free is justified.

The reason for that effect is the serialization of cells within a module and the serialization of modules to form a "string" with sufficient input voltage for the inverter. A single solar P-N-element (the "cell") features typically only 0,5 Volts. It takes 60 or so cells to form a "module" creating a typical open-circuit voltage of 30 volts. 12-15 serially connected modules then create a string with 360 to 450 volts input at the inverter. Shadowing only one module or even only one cell within "pulls down" the whole string unless the current is lead through the bypass diodes, which means that the bypassed module is "cut out" effectively for the moment.

In that sense "trees" can be the natural enemy of  the solar entrepreneur.
In my case 4 massive 12-15m pine trees had to be victimized.