First HDR Attempts

It's been a while ...

So I thought I'd try my hand at HDR shots.  Took some pics of the town centre parish church, but it was too dark - lesson number 1, take these shots at dusk / dawn, not at bona fide night.  Also took some pics on the river but got nasty lens flare ... I think I need to clean my skylight filter (or something).

I got lens flare on my shots of the Ivy House too, but not so bad that would ruin them.  It's not the best composition in the world (lots of road! I was hoping for car-light trails but lesson number 2 - HDR kinda kills that, almost by definition) but it demonstrates the technique.

I haven't bought photomatix yet as you'll see from the watermarks, but I can't deny it's impressed me.  These are three different versions using the same four bracketed shots:

Three beautiful things

This is a test, really, posting from my Android phone! But fwiw:

1) Getting outside and actually seeing some natural daylight several times today, for one reason or another

2) Joined a gym and had a good first session

3) Listened to the first few tracks of "When Harry Met Sally" for the first time in years. It really is an almost perfect album!

Formula 1 - How Close?

Is this the closest title contest ever? At the moment, after six races, the top 8 drivers are covered by only 22 points - that's less than the points awarded for a single race win. Has there ever been so many drivers seperated by less than 10 points (one win in old money) at this stage of the season?

By contrast, last year at this point there wasn't a single driver within 10 points of leader Jenson Button - closest was Rubens Barrichello who was 16 points behind. The previous year, four drivers (Hamilton, Massa, Raikkonen and Kubica) were within 10 points of the top. The year before that, only Fernando Alonso was in touch with Lewis Hamilton (eventual Championship winner Kimi Raikkonen was 21 points off the top at this stage).

Alas, I don't have the time and resources to track this back over the whole of F1 history, but my gut feeling is that this could well be the closest we've seen the competition after six rounds. I for one am hopeful that the Red Bulls won't now drive off into the distance, metaphorically speaking, and it'll still be close towards the end of the season.

13 rounds to go ...!

[with thanks to http://www.4mula1.ro/ - what a great resource!]

Year in Photos: DEAD!!

So, that lasted two days then.

And lo, on the third day, I took my camera into town expecting to grab another shot. I knew I was going out so I thought I'd get a nice night-time picture. Unfortunately, I was going out, so I got a bit worse for wear and totally forgot. Doh!

I took some shots on the fourth day but not much I'd post - some personal stuff (and I'm not going to put shots of friends & family online) and not much else.

The following day, I took a shot because I "had" to.

After that, I decided to ditch the "Year in Photos" thing - I don't want to end up taken distinctly average shots for the sake of it.

So now I'm going to try to do a "take decent photos more often that I have done historically" - so very occasionally you might see a decent photo from me that isn't from a family trip somewhere (not that there's anything wrong with those, of course!).

Watch this space!

Year in Photos: 2 of 365

You wait for six months and then three posts come along at once!

Here's today's photo in the soon-to-collapse-from-inattention "Year in Photos" feature on this blog. This set of buildings really stands out from its neighbours.

[click to see the whole picture!]:

Election Winner

By the way, I know it's early but I can tell you who's won the election ... it's ITV! Coverage is way better than the BBC, I'm astonished to say.

I'm back!!!

Hi!

Been a while ... Various things happened over the last six months or so - the xna thing went quiet, I think it suited all of us to stop pursuing it for different reasons. Then I had a scooter accident that has left me with some issues with my right leg (ligament damage and potentially other issues yet to be determined), which has put a bit of a downer on things at times ...

But I'm back, for now at least. Intend to do that thing where you take one photo every day for a year. Very, very unlikely to keep it up, but let's see shall we?

First photo yesterday, on my walk to work. This is near Bank in London. I liked the colours, the green leaves against the blue building, with the red telephone box between them. I think I could have done a better job of finding a composition that crunched those colours together - might have another go at this one at some point!

Note - please click on the photo to see all of it - there's only a slice visible below!

Lara, I Love You!

Recently I had another song broadcast on One Life Left, a radio show about videogames. In fact, an award winning radio show about videogames! I reckon it was my songs what won it!!!

The recent effort was actually a collaboration (something which to my great discredit I failed to inform the OLL team of, so my collaborator was uncredited!). We'd hoped he'd supply guitars to beef up the sound (with a solo verse, no less!), but it wasn't to be. Still, he supplied a couple of gag ideas and maybe a rhyme or two, so he should have received some of the limelight! Sorry ...

Anyway, it's an ode to Lara from an admirer. Enjoy!

Tweakables

I've been busy recently with XNA stuff, trying to get a nice physics model of a vehicle going. You soon discover that you accumulate a huge number of "settings" - constants that affect the behavior of your model. Tweaking these to get the best values you can (or maybe different styles of behavior for different "makes" of vehicle), can be a bit of a pain, restarting every time you want to make a tiny change and test it.

Imagine my delight then when I read this article by awesome XNA blogger Sean Hargreaves about "Tweakables" - the idea that you set up these constants so that you can adjust them on the fly, while the game is running. I knew I had to implement this - it's just too useful not too! (See Sean's next article for other potential uses).

I looked at Sean's suggestions for how to implement this in XNA ... but of course, I thought I had a better idea.

So I created a custom attribute, "Tweakable" (of course!), which I added to some of my static properties (which were simple, lazily coded public member variables until then). Then I created a form which iterates through all the types in my game's assembly, and for any "Tweakable" properties it finds, it adds corresponding controls onto the form (some work here to give them nice labels, organise into a tab per type, etc etc). Finally, an event handler is dynamically added to the controls so that the property is updated when the control is "left".

Et voila - when my game loads I also get a form for adjusting all the "tweakable" properties I like!

I intend to implement the ability to save all the current settings to file, and load them again, plus to start with an initial set. This way, I can save settings I like or which are useful for debugging, and I can exchange settings the rest of my "team" (there are three of us working on something together). I also need to expand the types of variables supported (admittedly just floats so far - will certainly need Vector3's which may require a custom control ...).

Le Mans

Another thing we did on holiday, was to make our pilgramage to Le Mans. There's a rather nice museum there - I took many, many photos of cars old & new, like this one:

Some legendary names - Go Jonny!!

I say that without irony - there have been more successful British Formula One drivers, but Jonny's still a hero in my eyes!

Speaking of heroes, here's me absolutely demolishing the lap time of the previous guy to have a go, while my eldest looks on:

They also had footage of that Mark Webber incident, where the Merc he was driving took off. Spectacular stuff!

Starry starry night

See, I said I'd blog some more!

On holiday in France near Royan, we heard it was going to be a good night for comets. Unfortunately, it quickly transpired that you can't really take photos of comets (at least, I certainly can't), but the night was AMAZING anyway, so clear (I swear you could see the galactic, erm, colorful stuff, y'know).

I knew I'd brought the tripod for a reason! I pointed the camera straight up and after a few experiments managed to capture the following with a 20 minute exposure:

Quite pleased with that, actually ...

Charity!

Hi to both of my readers! I know I've been a bad blogger recently ... I intend to get back to it (with a vengence) now that memories of my holiday are distant. Watch this space ...

In the meantime, if either of you are feeling charitable, I'm doing the "Corporate Markets Challenge"(!) through my work, and need to RAISE MONEY to help the poor children. THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!

So if you could sponsor me, it'd be much appreciated. Just visit http://www.justgiving.com/cmchallenge2009/, and please mention my team, "JIST Pick a Name", in your comments.

Thanks! You'll be rewarded with new blog posts soon ...

Born To Run

Just finished reading Born To Run, by Christopher McDougall, which is an awesome book. And now I want to do a 100-mile race. Unfortunately, 5k is more my distance at the moment.

Still, I've ordered some FiveFingers and hopefully that'll strengthen my feet up, as I get fitter and start attaining ultra-running distances. Probably I'll be up to 100 miles by next month ...

Bloom

I tried adding bloom ... it didn't entirely work. Not sure what was going wrong ...

Then I added Lens Flare (which doesn't work on my laptop anyway because it doesn't support "occlusion queries"!) ... and the bloom started working! I'd prefer to understand why this happened, but hey, it looks real purdy now!

hovership

Having abandoned clever-clever terrain stuff for now, I've run with bog-standard terrain stuff and got as far as creating a "hovership" to fly around it.

I spent a while getting the "dynamics" pretty good - it feels fun to fly now (although I'll still work on it for a while).

This picture is with some slightly "looser" settings, so it's not so much hovering as full-on flying. Looks nice, but this isn't intended to be an air combat game.

Do you like the "fog" effect?! I think I'm going to spend a little while applying some "bloom" and maybe normal-mapping to the terrain. I might add shadows, although my laptop can't generate them (the 360 will be able to!).

Then I have to start thinking about bullets (or whatever), enemies, AI, multiplayer, power-ups, more scenery objects (to hide behind, for instance) ...

I'm going to be busy!

Football Fiesta

I was privileged recently to be invited to photograph the local junior football fiesta (on a strictly amateur basis, of course!). Here are some of my efforts.

The FA Cup ... as you do:

This kid was great - I love the pointing finger:

Nice penalty:

Nice day for it:

Spot the right leg competition:










Throw it precisely ... there my son:




Celebrations (for some, anyway):


The loneliness of the goalie:


Jazz hands:








The Barclays Premier League Cup:




The ladeez:

I do need a better lens next time, though ...

Deathfield 1943

I've had a quick go of Battlefield 1937, or whatever year it's supposed to be, on Xbox Live Arcade. My experience goes something like this:

Spawn

Run to nearest area of battle (takes about 3 minutes)

Die

Repeat ad nauseam.

I'm the guy at the bottom with 10 points, from one kill the whole game.

What am I doing wrong?! I really, really want to like this game, but somehow it's just not working for me ...!

Suspect Sphere

The sphere terrain is mostly done, and it looks, well, ok ...:

This looks better in motion! But the normals aren't quite right, and it's a bit jagged, frankly:

Other problems - holes:

The pic's a bit small, but there's not supposed to be a hole up there! Also a big tear at one location:

All slightly depressing. This, coupled with thoughts about how we'll determine the "height" at a given location of the surface (measured in polar coords?) has given me a headache, and I'm considering throwing _this_ away too, and going back to basics - a common-or-garden, flat height-map. I think I'll still join it at the sides and top-to-bottom (so it's topologically a torus, geometry-fans!), because I don't want invisible walls and it's a reasonable way to avoid this.

But sphere would have been cooler ...!

Oh well, it emphasises that for a first project, the mantra "Keep It Simple, Stupid!" is worth sticking to.

Chase Challenge

I ran in the JPMorgan Chase Corporate Challenge in London last Thursday. If you search on "Stephen Minton", you'll see I ran the 5.5k (I think?!) course in about 32 mins - not bad, especially considering how jam-packed it was!

My lovely wife

My lovely wife knew I was a bit stressed with work, and she bought me a pressie - Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 for the Wii. She really is very, very lovely!

I've played a couple of rounds so far, and it's just what I'd hoped for - "realistic" enough to be a good challenge, without overdoing it. The motion+ controller stuff seems to work nicely, I get none of the false readings I'm used to seeing in (say) Wii Sports golf.

What a lovely wifey!