Out walking today in the sun, Bere Forest is close to my home, and this is a nice time to take in the autumn colour on the forest floor also the mass of fungi popping up everywhere..
The software produced by Kolor to make pana photo`s have just released a new pana book as below.. And I`m in it.. OK its a plug, but made me smile.Can be brought from hereProduct DescriptionThe Panobook is a compendium of the most beautiful panoramic images produced by a community of professional and amateur photographers from around the world. Stunning sites, unusual places, artistic montages and breathtaking landscapes have inspired the 221 contributors of this book. Bringing together so many people from such different backgrounds and cultures around a common photographic book is a first in the history of photography. This project will be renewed each year. The 365 panoramas regrouped in this book have the distinction of having been created using a stitching technique, i.e. they are composed of several individual images: two, three, four or even several dozens for some of them… This technique developed for several years by the company Kolor through Autopano Pro software, helped popularizing stitching-based panoramic photography. It is no longer necessary to own specific bulky, heavy and expensive hardware to access this photographic format. A simple digital camera is all that is needed. This field is no longer reserved to a handful of specialists. Now, casual amateurs, experienced amateurs as well as professional photographers can appropriate this technique and devote it to their creativity. We address many thanks to all the contributors without whom this book would not have existed. The high quality and the diversity of their photographic contributions make this book a unique object, both in the origin of the images (58 countries represented in the same book) and the aesthetic level of the panoramic photographs that were proposed. List of the contributors : Michel Accary, Kenji Akiyoshi, Robinson Alan, Ayman Aljammaz, Michel Allard, Leung Alvan, Philippe Aubert, Joël Bardin, Nic Barlow, Dominique Bec, Dirk Becker, Xavier Beguet, Frederic Beitz, Markus Bendler, Antoine Berger, Pascal Berlu, Pascal Bernard, Gérard Bernardini, Jean-Marie Biadatti, Gérard Biannic, Cyril Blazy, Bertrand Bodin, Yves Bodson, David Boggs, Fabien Bourdin, Christian Braut, Etienne Busson, S. Buxton, Jean-Pierre Caire, Georges Carrel, Laurent Carte, Marc Chauvière, Jason Cisneros, Paul Compton, Michel Comte, Hionis Con, Guy Cordelier, Gérard Coulon, Andreas Coutas, Chris Cunningham, Khôi-Nguyên Dang-Trung, Remy Dautheville, Jef De Becker, Dominique de Guillebon, Gérard de Wailly, Dmitry Degtyar, Claude Delaire, Philippe Delaplace, François Delauney, James Dery, Francis Desmond, Evaristo Tomas Diaz Fernandez, Andre Dreze, Gilles Dujon, Julien Dutheil, Maciej Dworak, Eric Epoudry, Henri Espié, Klaus Esser, Stéphane Evain, Yves Fauvel, Jan Felber, Emmanuel Fernandez, Bert Forbes, Arnaud Frich, Claude Gailledreau, Vincent Ganaye, Pascal Gautherot, Laurent Gebel de Gebhardt, Pierre Gentil, Murat Germen, Michel Giraudet, Richard Giubbini, Len Goldman, André Goossens, Jacques Gourier, Clive Griffiths, Luc Grillet, Alexandre Guinefort, Thierry Guinet, Peter Gutsche, Wolfgang Hahn, Matt Hardy, Jean-Louis Heitz, Julien Hericher, Michel Hernandez, Yves Hernandez, Michael Hilton, Ralph Hoffmann, Martin Holehouse, Leszek Imielski, Kurt In Albon, Wayne Jacobsen, Alexandre Jenny, Joseph Jensen, Mathis Joshua, Joël Juge, Wilfried Karl, Philippe Keller, Thierry Kergroac’h, Hady Khandani, Prashant Khapane, David Kinrade, Georg Kohr, Pierre Krausbauer, Trond Kristiansen, Martijn Kruijt, Frederick Kuckuck, Gérald Labrunie, Jean-Jacques Lacoudras, Lionel Laissus, Gérard Lalande, Yves Lambert, Laurent Lang, Eric Larcher, Christophe Larquié, Pierre Laugel, Thomas Lauzero, Jean-Pierre Le Corre, Christophe Lecomte, Marie-Hélène Leopold, Michael Lindsay, Chris Livingstone, Duncan Lock, Paul Lopes, Thibaut Loubère, Gérald Lucas, Andrew Lundquist, David Lyons, David Machet, Banthorpe Malcolm, Frédéric Mantegazza, Bruce Martin, Olivier Martinet, Matias Martorell, Matthew Massagli, Fulvio Massini, Kenji Matsushita, Shard Matthew, Olivier Menegol, Daniel Metral, Kezerashvili Mikhail, Thomas Mognetti, Gérard Moine, Damien Molyneux, Peter Morse, Stéphane Morvan, Malcolm Mosher Jr., Pierre Nantais, Julien Narboux, Patrick Nuiry, Greg Panayotou, Lukasz Panek, Ian Parr, Peter Pauer, Grob Peider, Yann Pendaries, Maxime Peregrini, Newman Peter, Magerus Philippe, Walter Pietsch, Matthias Pollmann, Jean-Claude Ponchel, Sylvestre Popinet, Pascal Porzio, Jasper Potts, Christian Praetorius, Mickael Profeta, Guillermo Puig, F Alfredo Rego, Christian Reinhardt, Didier Renvazé, Herve Rhinn, Gerard Rhinn, Jared Ribic, Dominique Richet, Zusman Robert, Jacques Rochet, DuWayne Rocus, Riccardo Rondinone, Andrea Rossi, Francine Roussel, Bernard Rousset, Arno Royant, Alain Saffray, Juraj Salak, Laurent Saleh, Raimund Sauer, Alberto Rot, Pascal Saulay, Christian Saunier, John Sauter, Etienne Sauvagère, Thorsten Schumm, Mark Schuster, Michael Seidel, Fantaguzzi Sergio, Xavier Spertini, Jirman Stan, Reed Steve, Bruno Stiefel, Daniel Tailhardat, Jean-Pierre Tiange, Ronald Tichelaar, Rami Tohme, Anthony Toulze, Brigitte Tranchand, Gilbert Treille, Denis Tremblay, Olivier Tubach, Matthew Turcott, Rob van Kralingen, Zac Vanderschyff, Gabrielle Voinot, Klaus Wagenhäuser, Matthias Wassermann, Christian Watier, William Wertz, Phillip Young, Mark Zbikowski, Elizabeth Zoob, François Zvardon. 
Computers have come a long way in 50 years (IBM)
Ask the average computer user what bugs them and they will probably mutter about the speed of their broadband connection and how slow their machine can be when working hard. It is not just computer users that moan about such things, computer makers are worried about them too. And there’s a good reason that the gripes and frustrations of the average computer consumer are shared by companies such as Intel. It’s because 80% of the computers sold with the chip maker’s processors on board end up in homes or on the lap of commuters and consumers, said Sean Maloney, head of sales and marketing for Intel. “In sheer volume terms, the big thing is that the industry is now aimed at the consumer,” said Mr Maloney. Old iron It was not always so. As recently as the early mid-1990s most of the volume sales were to businesses. The bigger ones swapped dumb terminals and mainframes for PCs and local area networks and the smaller firms swapped typewriters and ledgers for PCs and on-screen spreadsheets. “Business has not changed,” he said, “it has just been outnumbered.”
It also means that the nature of computer-selling has also changed. Consumers are less and less happy with a beige box that sits out of sight under a desk in the attic or a spare bedroom. Mr Maloney said that was partly because of a shift in who made the final decision about which machine to buy. In recent weeks Mr Maloney has travelled the world catching up with Intel’s sales partners. Many told him that women were far more likely to be making the final decision about the new computer for the home. “The purchase decision has become an aesthetic decision,” he said. Many were rejecting the black or beige boxes husbands and partners plumped for in favour of something that would not look out of place in the lounge. To help cope with this change, Mr Maloney said PC firms were looking to the mobile phone market. The home computer industry is now where that industry was about a decade ago when phones were relatively rare and expensive. Faster future Ten years on and handsets are everywhere and they range in price from dirt cheap to affordable. This explosion in use means the industry is subject to the whims of fashion and the fickle and shifting tastes of what people want to do with their phones.
Mr Maloney said the sales and adoption numbers showed that the computer world was going the same way. It also means computer makers must adapt what they make to the broad range of things people want to do with their computer – which usually involves the internet. To that end, he said, those desktop and laptop computers are about to undergo some significant changes. To begin with, computers are going to sport ever more processing cores. While dual and quad core machines are becoming common today, by 2011 eight cores will be standard in the average desktop. Alongside more cores goes a need to get data into and out of processors faster too. The next 12 months, said Mr Maloney, will see a radical shake-up of the input/output (I/O) systems inside PCs. “We have to get I/O speeds running a lot faster,” he said. “I/O speed has not changed in a decade. It has lagged behind your CPU – that’s why you are seeing your hard drive light flashing on and off so much.” Combined with this will be a broader move to solid-state hard drives that use memory chips to replace the whirring platters familiar today. The combination could mean a boost to I/O speed of at least 100 times and perhaps much more. The combined boost to performance sits well with what all those consumers are likely to be doing with their computers – be that choosing and cropping shots for a family calendar or processing video for a blog or YouTube. “Anything to do with video, imagery or audio is naturally suited to multi-processing,” said Mr Maloney. “It turns out that life is about multi-tasking.” Go Virtual Window Shopping At Amazon’s New Windowshop.com
About Windowshop.comOn Windowshop.com, you can either use your mouse or the arrow keys (the keyboard works better) to scroll through a wall of Amazon.com content which includes both best-sellers and new releases in Books, Music, Video, and Games categories. After you zoom in on an item, a preview will play. For an album, that preview is just a snippet of a song; for an audiobook, it’s a snippet of the narrator reading the content; for video content like movies, TV shows, and games, you’ll see a video clip displayed instead.
The content is sorted into different scrollable columns with column labels at the top describing the items below. There are columns with both the best-sellers and new items for each category, but there are also Editor’s Picks and “Best-Selling of All Time” categories, too. As new content is added to the site every Tuesday, the older content is moved to the right, which keeps the Windowshop.com product list in chronological order.
Cooliris Should Be FlatteredThe Windowshop site is so much like a Cooliris-enabled web page, that it had us scanning for a “powered by Cooliris” logo somewhere on the site. The scrolling, zoomable wall of content is very similar to what the Cooliris plugin provides. It seems the entire site has been inspired by the technology if it doesn’t, in fact, actually use it to power the virtual “windowshopping” itself. It’s interesting that this site was created only a few months after Amazon.com became Cooliris-enabled themselves, with their own Amazon category underneath the Discover/Shopping feature within the Cooliris browser. There, you can scroll through several other categories of content like Home & Garden, Baby, Electronics, the Kindle Store, and more. You can also sort the content displayed by price, popularity, or relevance. The Cooliris wall also has a nifty 3D effect when scrolled, where the Windowshop.com wall stays very much 2D.
Still, the Winodwshop site is another good alternative to visually browsing the best from Amazon.com, even if it is just a tribute to cooliris’s technology. You know what they say about imitation… We’ve seen more of these types of visual browsing technologies pop-up this year, from ManagedQ’s semantic Google-based search to Photo Stream’s visual newsroom and, more recently, to new search engines like Viewzi and SearchMe. We wonder: will 2008 be remembered as the year visual search took off? Another nice day here weather wise on the south coast of England, so walking boots on and off I go, the remains of a large forest are near to my home, called the Bere forest it used to spread over most of the south coast, now only little bits are left as the never ending swamping of building in the UK continues, if its bare, build on it is the motto in the UK now it seems.
The light was just ideal in the forest for a quite common technique called HDR photography, take a collection of photo`s taken of the same subject, all a set exposure apart, the squash em together to give a high definition photo, and as above this is what you end up with, not really able to show the real quality of them on here, click on the images above to see each photo in turn,seems to show then best, but they are very good for high shadow areas, where the exposure varies a lot, the HDR technique gets well over used sadly, and is a very gimmicky way of producing shots sometime, but if your lucky and get the right subject it seems to turn out well. The software I use is called Photomatix if you like it after trying the demo, do me a favour and buy it, so much software for so little money.. don`t just steal it from somewhere. Nice hdr demo here to explain the technique as well.
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