Tom Bennett

This was my first attempt at producing an HDR (high dynamic range) image, a technique that tone maps a series of normal range images to create a single high range image.

The photo above was created with a Canon EOS 350D, using it’s ‘auto exposure bracketing’ setting to take three images – all taken at ISO400, with f/7.1, f/5.6 and with f/4.5. This was lovely and simple to do, although I wish i’d taken them at ISO100 now to reduce the noise. Unfortunately, because AEB requires three photos, you need to be careful to choose a subject that isn’t going to move – rather stupidly I chose a boat. And yes, it moved (look for the blurring/ghosted images of the handrails on the front).

There are lots of tutorials out there, a couple of the simplest i’ve found are Vanilla Days’ HDR guide, and Stuck in Customs’ HDR tutorial.

Try it, it’s guaranteed to provide interesting results one way or another!

Yesterday a representative from one of VMware’s reseller’s came over to FreshMinds to give a demonstration of their new Virtual Infrastructure 3 suite.

I am seriously impressed with it.

Just to give people an idea of what it does, and to quote VMware themselves:

“VI3 allows multiple unmodified operating systems and their applications to run independently in virtual machines while sharing physical resources.”

And it does that very very well indeed. It seems that VMware have created a suite of tools that will not just impress the systems administrator with what they can do, they will also make his life an awful lot easier to boot. VMotion is a prime example of this – allowing virtual machines to be seamlessly shifted between physical hosts with little to no visible effect on performance.

And they even provide a free version to get you started/hooked.

• VMware Player – a tool that lets you evaluate new or pre-release software contained in virtual machines, without any installation or configuration hassles. You can also share existing virtual machines with colleagues or friends—just use VMware Player to run any virtual machine
• VMware Server – VMware Server installs on any existing server hardware and partitions a physical server into multiple virtual machines by abstracting processor, memory, storage and networking resources, giving greater hardware utilization and flexibility.
• VMware Converter – VMware Converter quickly converts Microsoft Windows based physical machines and third party image formats to VMware virtual machines.

All are simple to use – VMware Server took me no longer than an hour to install, configure and perform a complete installation of Win2k3 – and they work ’straight out of the box’. Going to do some serious user testing over the next few weeks – i’m sure there’s much more praise to come!