Having taken a few days of recently, I manage to catch up on some reading. One of the books was Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. When I first started to read it you say to yourself "I already know that", but if stay with it and actually read all of the words of this book then you'll discover many little gems of info that will help you to be more creative in your photography.

The exercises in the book changed my view of the world and hopefully my photography will get better in the process.

 

The UltraCamX, a large Format Digital Aerial Camera, uses CCD technology, employing 7.2 micrometer pixels thus achieving an even larger image format at 14,430 x 9,420 pixels without sacrificing radiometric performance.

UltraScan 5000
A highly automated photogrammetric scanner designed and field-tested by photogrammetrists, producing digital images of un-compromising quality.

UltraMap Workflow Software System
A complete and integrated photogrammetric workflow for UltraCam images, with a flexible and scalable distributed system for managing and processing vast amounts of UltraCam data.

Microsoft Ultracam Home

Microsoft has launched WorldWide Telescope, a free application that enables users to navigate the universe and view celestial objects through the lenses of the world's best observatories

What is WWT?

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.
Choose from a growing number of guided tours of the sky by astronomers and educators from some of the most famous observatories and planetariums in the country. Feel free at any time to pause the tour, explore on your own (with multiple information sources for objects at your fingertips), and rejoin the tour where you left off. Join Harvard Astronomer Alyssa Goodman on a journey showing how dust in the Milky Way Galaxy condenses into stars and planets. Take a tour with University of Chicago Cosmologist Mike Gladders two billion years into the past to see a gravitational lens bending the light from galaxies allowing you to see billions more years into the past.
WorldWide Telescope is created with the Microsoft® high performance Visual Experience Engine™ and allows seamless panning and zooming around the night sky, planets, and image environments. View the sky from multiple wavelenghts: See the x-ray view of the sky and zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then crossfade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago. Switch to the Hydrogen Alpha view to see the distribution and illumination of massive primordial hydrogen cloud structures lit up by the high energy radiation coming from nearby stars in the Milky Way. These are just two of many different ways to reveal the hidden structures in the universe with the WorldWide Telescope. Seamlessly pan and zoom from aerial views of the Moon and selected planets, as well as see their precise positions in the sky from any location on Earth and any time in the past or future with the Microsoft Visual Experience Engine.
WWT is a single rich application portal that blends terabytes of images, information, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a seamless, immersive, rich media experience. Kids of all ages will feel empowered to explore and understand the universe with its simple and powerful user interface.
Microsoft Research is dedicating WorldWide Telescope to the memory of Jim Gray and is releasing WWT as a free resource to the astronomy and education communities with the hope that it will inspire and empower people to explore and understand the universe like never before.

WorldWide Telescope

DNG Codec

From Adobe Labs

Welcome to the Adobe® DNG Codec release candidate on Adobe Labs. The DNG Codec provides a method for Windows Vista users to view DNG files in the Windows Explorer and Photo Gallery. The ‘release candidate’ label applied to this technology indicates that the codec includes all of the intended features and is well tested but will not be released as a finished product until the community is able to help ensure that a larger set of hardware and software configurations are used with the Codec.

For more information on the DNG format, please visit the DNG pages on Adobe.com

System Requirements

• Microsoft Windows Vista (This codec is not compatible with the Windows Vista 64-bit platform)

Download and Installation

1. Download the DNG Codec
2. Double click the downloaded dngcodec_r1_051208.msi file
3. Follow the on-screen installation instructions
4. The DNG Codec may require that you restart your computer before use

Release Notes

• Please provide feedback on your experience with the DNG Codec on the Adobe User to User forums
• The DNG Codec will move from a release candidate to a shipping version once sufficient feedback is received
• Additional information about the Windows Vista codec system can be found on the Microsoft web site

Retrieved from "http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_Codec"

DNG Codec - Adobe Labs

Peachpit Press announced that The Digital Photography Book Vol. 1 by Scott Kelby is the best-selling book on digital photography ever, having sold over a quarter-million copies so far. Congratulations to Scott for the tremendous success of this volume.

What does it mean to say, "Find your photos?" Traditionally that meant literally just finding where particular photos reside on your computer (or a physical location back when film was king). But with new tools and advanced technology, finding your photos can mean finding not just the photos themselves, but finding the exact location where you took a photo. This, in turn, will make it even easier to search for the photos themselves later. Microsoft Pro Photo Tools, a free download available at the Microsoft Pro Photo Web site, enables you to apply location information to your photos so you can always know exactly where they were captured.

It gets even better though. Leveraging the power of Windows Live Local, Pro Photo Tools will then determine the location name information for the photos based on the GPS coordinates. This allows you to have more meaningful location information attached to your photos, which is especially helpful when you want to later search or images based on their specific location. Full article at the link below

Microsoft Pro Photo: Geotagging Goes Mainstream

'CSI' sleuths out Microsoft's latest technology

The Microsoft technology behind the scenes:

Photosynth. Stitches together a large collection of photos and turns them into 3-D images, viewable from any angle. Due out by year's end. Preview at labs.live.com/photosynth/default.html
HD View. Still in the labs, this imaging technology is kind of like Photosynth on steroids. research.microsoft.com/ivm/HDView/HDabout.htm
Microsoft Surface. Interactive tabletop computers recently made their commercial debut in some AT&T stores. Microsoft.com/surface
Orb motion-based controller in futuristic bedroom on Microsoft Home website uses OLED (organic light emitting display) technology to change the artwork, video clips and Web pages shown on the wall. Considered five to 10 years out.

Enlarge
By Randy Tepper, CBS

By Edward C. Baig, USA TODAY

A guidance counselor at a Manhattan prep school is murdered while the prom is taking place in the gymnasium.

Forensic scientists for the New York police attempt to recreate the crime scene by uploading hundreds of camera phone thumbnail photos snapped at the dance onto a computer.

STORY: Toddlers coming of digital age

The PC screen fills up in a concentric square pattern, revealing a wide shot of the gym at the center. Investigators can manipulate the images to show close-ups of the scene from every angle.

This episode of the CBS crime drama CSI: NY, scheduled to run Wednesday night, is fiction. But the technology at its core, Microsoft's Photosynth software, is real. It analyzes scores of images for similarities and stitches them into a three-dimensional reconstruction.

'CSI' sleuths out Microsoft's latest technology - USATODAY.com