Wells Fargo Tower, originally uploaded by DaveWilsonPhotography.

The nice folks over at HDRSoft, the makers of my HDR software of choice, Photomatix Pro, have signed me up for their affiliate program. This is a win-win-win arrangement as far as I can see since all parties benefit – you get a discount, HDRSoft get a sale and I get a commission. I’ve seen several others advertising HDRSoft discount codes but didn’t realise before this week that the arrangement involved a seller commission. In the spirit of full disclosure, though, I thought it would be right to mention this.

If you are buying a copy of Photomatix and use the coupon code “DaveWilson” when you are checking out, you will receive a 15% discount on the purchase, and I will thank you very much.

Despite the mutually beneficial arrangement, I should point out that I have been a huge fan of this software for several years now and, as regular readers will know, have pretty much been acting as an HDRSoft salesman for most of this time!

I spent the early part of this afternoon trying to get Nikki’s minivan out of an area of mud that it had got stuck in last night while at a school event for Cameron. The event was a star party organised by one of our neighbours, Mike Reid. Oddly enough, I wasn’t there since Cameron was sick but, after releasing the car, Mike kindly showed me his observatory and some of the images he’s captured using it. I was blown away that you could capture that kind of image with such a relatively small telescope. He’s even managed to capture exoplanet transits using the same gear!

I’ve long been impressed by astrophotography but today’s visit was a real eye-opener and I encourage you to take a look at the amazing images that Mike has captured.

Wrecked Fire Truck, originally uploaded by DaveWilsonPhotography.

Each week, several hundred photobloggers enter a competition on the “Photo Friday” site. A theme is announced and anyone who is interested can submit the URL of one photo on that theme. The following week, voting is opened up to the entrants and the week after the winners are announced.

I’ve entered half a dozen times or so when the theme seemed to fit an image I have somewhere on the photoblog but the competition always has some truly superb images and several hundred entries so I never expected to appear in the winning list. This morning, though, I was surprised to see a spike in blog traffic from PhotoFriday and even more surprised to see that this picture won the last challenge on the theme “Damaged”.

Given the other pictures in the challenge and some of the folks who entered (my picture beat one by David Nightingale, a truly outstanding photographer!) this leaves me feeling very honoured indeed.

Sorry to spend yet another blog post blowing my own trumpet but this one really caught me off guard and has definitely made my photographic week.

Just for the record, I would have scored at least 3 of the other top 5 pictures, including David’s, higher than mine.

Shuttle Orbiter, Space Center Houston, originally uploaded by DaveWilsonPhotography.

Back in September, I was fortunate enough to spend a weekend at Space Center Houston with our Cub Scout pack. I’m sure many of the other parents and the JSC staff thought it was odd but I carried a tripod around all weekend and managed to get quite a few good shots of the exhibits while there were practically no other people around (we spent the night in the visitors’ center and the boys were off doing activities most of the time when they were not sleeping – great HDR time for Daddies with tripods).

There is no full sized orbiter in the visitor center but “Adventure” offers a look at the nose section and flight deck. This image was one that cried out for black-and-white. The texture of the tiles wasn’t too obvious in the original image but a bit of tweaking brought it out beautifully.

If you happen to be down in Houston with a day to spare, I can definitely recommend Space Center as a great place to take a family even if you’re not camping with the Cub Scouts.

Fotomoto Featured Artist, originally uploaded by DaveWilsonPhotography.

I was very pleasantly surprised to find one of my photos on the home page of FotoMoto this morning. FotoMoto are the print service provider I use for my photoblog – any order for a print, greeting card or e-card you place via the photoblog is processed, printed and shipped by them. Their print quality and customer service are superb so, if you’re a photoblog owner looking for some way to offer your prints for sale, you could do a lot worse than take a look at FotoMoto’s site for more information.

From my perspective, FotoMoto offers two benefits that many of the other printing services don’t offer. Firstly, it’s extremely easy to set up an account and get your images listed for sale. The process involves filling in a form on their web site then pasting a small section of JavaScript into your page header. After this, any image over some minimum dimension you specify is automatically added to the catalog and offered for sale.

The second big advantage they offer is that you only need to upload print-ready, high resolution images after an image is first ordered. As a result, you can offer a large number of images easily without having to do significant work on any until you make a sale.

I was already a delighted FotoMoto customer before this but now I guess I’m even more delighted to have been honoured with a place on their home page.

Practically everyone who reads this blog has heard of Austin photographer Trey Ratcliff, owner of the Stuck In Customs blog and author of the much publicised new book “A World In HDR“. What you may not know, however, is that there is quite a collection of other excellent HDR photographers in Austin. Here are a few of the guys that I enjoy shooting with and whose blogs (if they have a blog) I read regularly. In case anyone gets miffed, these are listed in alphabetical order by last name. I’ve linked to both their Flickr profiles and their blogs or Flickr streams.

• Evan Gearing (EG Photography)
• Jerry Hayes (Flickr stream)
• Jim Nix (Nomadic Pursuits)
• John Rogers (Visualist Images)
• Don Schulte (Oxherding is Fun)
• Jason St. Peter (50% Chance of Rain)
• Van Sutherland (Exile Imaging)
• Pete Talke (Places 2 Explore)
• Michael Tuuk (Michael Tuuk Photography)

If you are a fellow Austin HDR enthusiast, leave a comment with your contact details below.

As a teenager, I remember having one of my great (teenage) “Aha Moments” while watching “Cosmos” and realising that a very high percentage of my, personal atoms were once spewed out of a supernova. Wow! Me – the stuff of stars! Since then I’ve had many more such moments, many somewhat more obscure or esoteric but I still love the idea of being the product (albeit rather indirectly) of stellar explosion.

My love of physics took me to university to study it (yes, I’m a physicist by training and a programmer by hobby ) and I still love marveling at the beauty of Maxwell’s Equations (not that I can derive them any more), debating the weirdnesses of Quantum Mechanics (just where is that pesky electron after it passes through one of those slits?) and trying to explain Special Relativity (though, again, the 20 years since my last lecture on the subject leaves me extremely rusty).

So why did all this come to mind today? My 10 year old was downloading some new tracks from iTunes and one of them reminded me of the backing track of a rather clever video containing 2 of my physics superheroes (Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan) that I stumbled upon a while ago. If you are in awe of your starstuff, take a look…

If you enjoy this video, you can find several others at Symphony of Science.

Barn, Johnson City, Texas, originally uploaded by DaveWilsonPhotography.

I’ve always considered myself an early adopter but, thinking about it, I’m actually rather behind the times these days. We are probably the only house in Austin without an HDTV (which is doubly weird given that I used to work in software development for HD satellite and cable settop boxes) and both my computer monitors are still CRTs. My computer, until this weekend, was a rather clunky and extremely unreliable HP system running Windows XP on a dual-core AMD Athlon 64. Much as I love Adobe Lightroom 2, running it felt very similar to wading through syrup.

Things changed this week, though. In anticipation of my upcoming expedition to Utah and in celebration of the start of a new tax year, I’ve bought my first laptop and fully intend this to become my main digital darkroom machine with the HP relegated to the role of file and print server. The new machine is a Dell Studio XPS 16 with a Core2Duo CPU, 6MB L2 cache, 7200rpm hard disk, upgraded graphics card and 64 bit Windows 7. It’s an absolute screamer (for a Windows machine)!

I’ve installed 64 bit versions of all my software where these versions are available. Lightroom 2, Lightroom 3 Beta, Photoshop CS4 and Photomatix Pro 3.2 all come in “double-wide” versions and the performance difference compared to my old machine is staggering. Lightroom exports happen in a very small number of seconds and, even more impressively, I can view the effects of slider changes in the Develop module in real time! No more “move the slider, wait for the effect”!

Couple this superb performance with the fact that the display is absolutely gorgeous (allegedly having a colour gamut encompassing the whole AdobeRGB space) and I’m definitely enjoying this as my new mobile office.

Oh, I almost forgot – it’s red too.

I just took a look at the blog traffic stats and was stunned to see that I’m receiving a huge number of visitors just now! Traffic in the last 24 hours was 20 times my daily average and 4 times higher than the previous daily maximum (which occured a week or so ago when Trey Ratcliff kindly posted a tweet pointing HDR enthusiasts at this post).

I had expected a bit of a bump after Jim Goldstein’s blog posting containing a list of his readers’ “Best of 2009” blog posts since this contained a link to my entry here. Things really took off, however, when Jim reposted the list on Digital Photography School this morning.

I guess this is a pretty pointless meta-post but, hey – it feels good to be welcoming so many visitors. If some of you hang around, I promise to start writing more interesting posts as 2010 moves on

View From The Top, originally uploaded by DaveWilsonPhotography.

Jim Goldstein has just posted a list of 123 “Best of 2009″ posts by the readers of his blog. There is some superb work in there and, if you’re looking to add a few more photoblog RSS feeds to your reader, this would be a great place to start. Thanks again, Jim, for gathering these links and posting the list!

The picture I’m posting here is another one that I probably should have added to my own “Best of 2009” post. Maybe I’ll expand it to 10 images at some point? This was taken from the observation deck of the Rockefeller Center in New York during my trip there in October this year.