Under Clacton Pier at Dawn

 

A shot from underneath Clacton pier at dawn (click on it for a larger version). It's actually 5 shots merged into one using a process known as tonemapping, which takes a series of pictures at varying exposures and averages them out. It's the photographic technique equivalent of Marmite, largely due to the number of badly processed images that are out there. It's easy to turn everything up to the max and end up with something that looks completely false and unrealistic.

I'm not suggesting that this one of mine is particularly great but it does represent what I actually saw at the time, i.e. the bright rays of the sun making shade patterns between the columns and also the detail below the boards. A camera can't capture the range of contrast that our eyes/brain interpret so a single photo is either too bright or too dark. There are some good HDR tutorials on the web, with the two best that I've found being:

• Trey Ratcliffe's Stuck In Customs, which is free, or
• David Nightingale's Chromasia site, which requires a subscription but has a wider range of training

Both have also recently released books on HDR technique (links are to Amazon UK): A World in HDR by Trey and Practical HDR by David. I've not read either of them yet but since both are excellent exponents of the art, they should be worth a look.

W7 Now Fully Installed

If you read the previous post you'll know I've been having some fun and games installing W7 64-bit on a clean machine. Last you heard, I was able to start from the beginning (again)...

Well, the short version of the story is that it's now fully installed and operational. After the previous issues seemed to be related to the quality of the drivers for  the Gigabyte motherboard's (the GA-EP35-DS3) SATA ports, I decided to replace the Hitachi 500GB SATAII hard drive with a spare Samsung 160GB PATA drive, hoping that using IDE would be more successful. Sure enough it was, though the build wasn't exactly plain sailing as a couple of blue screens did appear when Windows Update was run for the first time. Compared to the previous attempts however, it was almost a breeze.

So, to get it to work this was what I had to do:

• Use a PATA/IDE drive for the installation.
• Connect the BD-ROM drive to the Gigabyte SATA ports (as I knew I could download the driver from the Gigabyte website).
• Once built and able to log on, I downloaded the Gigabyte drivers for the SATA ports, LAN card and Audio.
• Before installing any other software I ran Windows update to get some application compatibility fixes installed.
• The first time I ran Windows Update, it blue screened while downloading the 8 Important updates. I rebooted and installed them one by one until the compatibility updates were installed and then the final 3 in a single batch.
• Then I downloaded and ran the Intel INF Update Utility to update the Intel chipset (USB and SATA).
• Finally I ran Windows Update again to get the optional updates (graphics card and LAN chip drivers). The graphics card driver installed first time, which was strange as it refused to do so on a previous attempt.

To sum up, it wasn't a pleasant installation experience. As a techie, I refused to let it beat me but 'normal' users may well have given up and installed something else instead. I could have understood it if I was using leading edge hardware but all of the components have been on the market for a year or so.

Windows 7 - A Premium Experience?

The following describes my experiences in installing Windows 7 Home Premium as a clean install on a new machine. I've never had such a bad experience in trying to install a version of Windows (desktop or server) in my 20+ years of working in IT. 24 hours after starting, I finally thought I'd cracked it but I'm now writing this before starting again for the umpteenth time. And I - supposedly - know what I'm doing.

Mrs Vinman's PC has been playing up for a while and it's fairly old now, so I decided to build her a replacement for her birthday. There seemed little point in buying Vista so I pre-ordered a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium. I sat down yesterday afternoon with a nice cup of tea and decided to spend an hour or so installing it. That was at 2pm. Shortly after 2am this morning I went to bed, thinking that I'd finally cracked it and could start transferring her data. Hah! After it trashed itself this morning I'm just about to start again.

Click the Read More link below to see the full details of the issues I experienced. I'll post separately if and when it installs reliably. For now, I'd say wait before you try as not all manufacturers seem to have made drivers available. I think several of the problems I'm having relate to chipset and SATA drivers for my Gigabyte motherboard. The Gigabyte website has W7 64-bit drivers for the sound chip, SATA RAID (their own controller, not the Intel) and the LAN chip but not the chipset. A DriverAgent scan advised that the USB and SATA drivers were out of date but the links to download updated ones were incorrect.