Arlen Ward dot com

If I had an observatory at my house, I would be out there all the time. If I had big telescopes at my house, you would have to pry me away with a crowbar. People would be sick of hearing me talk about the stars and planets, and they would run and hide every time I got out the pictures.

But alas, it is not so for everyone.

As reported in the Independent, Pope Benedict XVI is moving the observatory off the grounds of his summer residence.

Science is to make way for diplomacy at the Pope’s summer residence, with the dismantling of the astronomical observatory that has been part of Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, for more than 75 years. The Pope needs more room to receive diplomats so the telescopes have to go.

Moving it to make more room to receive diplomats? I think the stars would be more interesting, but nobody died and made me Pope.

I have added some pictures to the gallery from recent outings.

I took some pictures at the church after the decorations went up for the Advent season.

The rest of those pictures can be found here, under the South Broadway album.

We also took a trip to the Glass Studio for C & H Glassworks for a glass blowing demonstration.

You can find more pictures from the field trip here, also under the South Broadway album.

High Dynamic Range Imaging is a process for getting more exposure information for a single image than is currenly possible with camera sensors. It is really useful for taking pictues where there is a vast difference in lighting conditions, high contrast conditions. Your eye is has a large dynamic range, and one of the frustrations with photography is how often the picture you take doesn’t look anything like the scene you observed. Taking interior photographs of stained glass windows is a good example. For proper exposure of the window, everything else is dark, while if you set the exposure to see the interior architecture, the windows are very overexposed. With HDR, both areas are visible.

With the proliferation of digital cameras and software for image manipulation, HDR photography has become very easy to try, as is evidenced by the number of examples on flickr. I love the images that result, and how they can be either quite life-like or very surreal. So I started trying it. My Canon XTi has an automatic exposure bracketing (AEB) mode, which makes it easy to get an under exposed and over exposed image right after the normal exposure. Coupled with the software for combination and tonemapping provided by Photomatix, it is easy to play with HDR photography.

While in France, I took advantage of the AEB, and came home with many sets of images. I have been playing around with the images, and here are some of the results…