HDR can not be fully appreciated or understood without comparing the before and after photographs. This post shows 20 examples, some perfectly illustrating how HDR should be used, and others illustrating how badly a photo can look. All photographs, images and materials are copyright to their respective owners.

1. Jon, thanks for putting some time aside to answer a few questions. I’ve been a big fan of your work and style for years now, but for our readers who have never heard of you could you tell us a little about yourself and your company?

Hicksdesign is just myself and my wife Leigh, based in Witney, Oxfordshire. Started in 2002, we’ve become most known for the FIREFOX LOGO, but we work on a wide variety of design mediums, from web to print.

2. You’re best known for the FIREFOX LOGO and branding, can you tell us more about that?

http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/branding-firefox ;o)

3. What have you been involved with recently that you want to shout about?

I’m working on some great projects that will hopefully see the light of day soon. New logo for Mailchimp, a Darwin Centenary project for the University of Reading and a large icon project for the next version of LINOTYPE FONTEXPLORER. I’ve also been working on an updated, detailed version of the Firefox logo, but that won’t be seen any time soon sadly!

4. My first job was a Saturday cleaner at a local Butchers for £2 an hour, what was your first job and what did you gain from it?

A paper round, delivering free papers every Thursday during holidays. I gained enough money to eventually buy my first walkman, and a better understanding of the local area. Can’t remember what the pay was though!

5. I never went to university after college, opting to learn the trade hands on. What route did you take before starting out on your successful career.

I left school at 16, avoided Sixth Form, and went straight to art college to do a BTEC ND in Technical Illustration for 2 years. That was followed by 3 years studying wildlife illustration at HND level (Flickr link ). I’d planned to spend the rest of my life as a wildlife (and in particular, bird) illustrator, but I found it a hard market to break into.

I worked as a designer for 8 years, with charities and finally an educational publisher, before going freelance in 2002. Hicksdesign then became a partnership in 2007, and finally a Limited Company in 2008.

Instead I got my first job as a junior designer for Coventry City Council, where I learned the ropes of print design. I already had basic design skills, and good experience on Macs, but this was at a time when there was still paste-up artwork. I still miss those days, going home with the smell of spray mount in my nose, and cut up letters on my elbows.

6. Who would you say are your biggest influences in the industry, past and present.

In the 90′s I was first turned on to design by David Carson and Vaughn Oliver, then to web design by Pixelsurgeon. Since then, I’d count David Shigley, Joshua Davis, Brendan Dawes, Genevieve Gauckler and Jason Santa Maria.

7. Away from work what gets the blood rushing?

That’s between my wife and I! ;o)

Apart from that, Doctor Who and new Apple products. Hoping for a new MacBook Pro soon…

8. If you approached a step ladder on the street, would you walk around and under it?

Under it if there is space – not sure why though…

I think I like the feeling of being inside a triangle?

9. What gadget could you not live without?

My MacBook Pro, because it’s my work machine, newspaper, entertainment system – everything! It goes more or less everywhere with me. My iPhone would be second.

10. And finally, what has been the greatest achievement in your life so far?

Children! Granted, I had little to do with the process, but amazing nonetheless!

Final thoughts

You can read all about Jon, his work and read his rather excellent blog here.

Infrared?

Infrared? Hey didn’t Superman have infrared vision? He could see through clothes right?

Infrared was The Predator I think, Superman used X-ray vision, but yes he could.

Lets have a bit of science to see what Infrared actually is before I ramble the ears off you.

Infrared: The Science

In infrared photography, the film or image sensor used is sensitive to infrared light. The part of the spectrum used is referred to as near-infrared to distinguish it from far-infrared, which is the domain of thermal imaging. Wavelengths used for photography range from about 700 nm to about 900 nm. Usually an “infrared filter” is used; this lets infrared (IR) light pass through to the camera, but blocks all or most of the visible light spectrum (the filter thus looks black or deep red).

When these filters are used together with infrared-sensitive film or sensors, very interesting “in-camera effects” can be obtained; false-color or black-and-white images with a dreamlike or sometimes lurid appearance known as the “Wood Effect.”

The effect is mainly caused by foliage (such as tree leaves and grass) strongly reflecting in the same way visible light is reflected from snow. There is a small contribution from chlorophyll fluorescence, but this is extremely small and is not the real cause of the brightness seen in infrared photographs.

The other attributes of infrared photographs include very dark skies and penetration of atmospheric haze, caused by reduced Rayleigh scattering and Mie scattering, respectively, compared to visible light. The dark skies, in turn, result in less infrared light in shadows and dark reflections of those skies from water, and clouds will stand out strongly. These wavelengths also penetrate a few millimeters into skin and give a milky look to portraits, although eyes often look black.

Credit: Wikipedia

Back to the point of the article

Putting all the science to one side, I like Infrared photography because it shows what the naked eye can’t see. The colours it can produce brings a different dimension to photography as we know it, and scenes as we see them. Take a look at the following examples to see for yourself how beautiful Infrared photography can be.

Examples

Summary

Infrared photography is new to me, until I had a conversation with my father in-law last month about IR I’d never heard of it. It seems digital IR is easier to master than traditional film IR photography, with filters and sensor adjustment services readily available. But to be honest, I think it’s a little too advanced for me at the moment, so I’ll start with the basics and work towards IR. *hats off to all those who have conquered IR, I’m simply amazed.

I need to do a bit more flag waving for Ubuntu Linux. I have said it before, and I will say it again:

Ditch Microsoft Windows.

Download Ubuntu for free, don’t pay the Microsoft tax.

Anyway, my most recent wonderfulism was when I was sharing printers. A few years ago I was using Fedora Linux on a machine upstairs. Vicky was using Windows XP downstairs and wanted to use the printer that was connected upstairs.

Frankly this was always a pain in the arse.

It didn’t “Just Work” ™. Windows hated the printer. I had to edit config files by hand on the Linux machine.

A few weeks ago I re-installed the operating system, overwriting it with Ubuntu because I’m desperately trying to sell my old machine (shameless plug!).

I was dreading setting the printer sharing backup – but I needn’t have worried. About a dozen clicks later, on both Linux and Windows and lo’ it was all working.

If you want to share your printer with Windows, do this:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NetworkPrintingFromWinXP

I should say by the way that I’m not sure whether this is because Ubuntu is ace, or just because Linux has moved on somewhat in recent years. I suspect the latter, it would certainly be unwise to draw conclusions about Fedora based on this as it would not be a fair test!

I saw an interesting article today pointing out a couple of overlooked vulnerabilities with data truncation in MySQL. It’s more of a bug in due to how you handle the event in application than in the database, but it’s a vulnerability none the less.

MySQL won’t be the only affected RDBMS (I know, MySQL really is an RDBMS … just) – off the top of my head I guess that Microsoft SQL Server would have the same behaviour with ANSI_PADDING OFF, and with some versions of ADO I recall that these warnings don’t appear in say your ASP application.

It’s also a good reminder that out of the box the following query (note the trailing whitespace) will return ’1′ – which may be counter-intuitive if you don’t remember.

SELECT CASE WHEN 'B'
               = 'B ' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END;

I feel a bit dim for not having this drilled into my tiny mind already. Thankfully I validate data against column lengths by default… I prefer not to trim data on the way in as mangling user input in subtle ways like that can lead to irritating behaviour from the user’s point of view, and perhaps other bugs.

I was entertained on the way to work today. As I drove through Hull I saw “Colin’s fresh fish” van.

His strapline, emblazened across his van was:

“Eat more Fish”

I just thought that this was amusing, and honest. I think that more companies should use that line. “Eat more McDonald’s”, “Buy more Fords” – get straight to the point with no pretentious bullshit and overpaid celebrities.

Let me start with a confession – I’m very bad at English! I got a double-D at school and still struggle to understand the meaning of the words VERB, NOUN and ADJECTIVE. Squid would be first in line to correct me on my spelling mistakes or my bad grammar. So you could possibly forgive me for the misuse of apostrophes in sentences.

I work in the web industry, I design on a dynamic canvas which is never set in stone, so once the quality assurance people have gone through one of my websites and very eagerly pointed out my obvious mistakes they can be corrected in a matter of moments. Professionals that work in print, a journalist writing for a newspaper or a designer piecing together their latest snazzy brochure, face the stomach stomping realisation that any mistakes they miss, which subsequently get printed can’t be so easily correctly.

Apostrophes, and the use of, always spark a debate in my studio, so not knowing the in’s and out’s of their proper use I decided to Google for it. Below is a nice reference to help all those who face the confusing matter of how properly to use the dreaded apostrophe.

All can be explained

1. They are used to denote a missing letter or letters, for example:

I can’t instead of I cannot
I don’t instead of I do not
it’s instead of it is

2. They are used to denote possession, for example:

the dog’s bone
the company’s logo
Jones’s bakery (but Joneses’ bakery if owned by more than one Jones)

… but please note that the possessive form of it does not take an apostrophe any more than ours, yours or hers do

the bone is in its mouth

… however, if there are two or more dogs, companies or Joneses in our example, the apostrophe comes after the ‘s’:
the dogs’ bones
the companies’ logos
Joneses’ bakeries

3. Apostrophes are NEVER ever used to denote plurals! Common examples of such abuse (all seen in real life!) are:

Banana’s for sale which of course should read Bananas for sale
Menu’s printed to order which should read Menus printed to order
MOT’s at this garage which should read MOTs at this garage
1000′s of bargains here! which should read 1000s of bargains here!
New CD’s just in! which should read New CDs just in!
Buy your Xmas tree’s here! which should read Buy your Xmas trees here!

May I take this opportunity to thank The Apostrophe Protection Society for protecting the proper use of the apostrophe in the English language. Full credit goes to them and a further, more detailed explanation can be found here.

Finally the BETA version of the Google Chrome web browser is available for download.

Download it now!

Make way for Google Chrome, Google’s new web browser

Google is set to introduce a new Web browser, designed specifically to handle rich-media, video and other complex Web programs, called Google Chrome.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

The launch of Chrome coincides with the recent introduction by arch-rival Microsoft of its Internet Explorer 8 last month. Internet Explorer holds roughly three-quarters of the browser market, followed by Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple Inc’s Safari browsers.

Google Chrome comic book

Google have a cool comic about Chrome.

Google appears to have soft-launched this site for Google Chrome, its open source browser, which is slated for release on Windows tomorrow.

We stayed up into the early hours of the morning to bring The Floating Frog a swanky new design. It’s a bit brighter, a bit wider and has a few more features. Let us know what you think