Before I get into the story proper, I should address the patient audience reg. the hiatus. Well, I have nothing much to offer in terms of juicy details, I have been commuting regularly on the bike and that’s about it. It has become so commonplace, I find it rote to write about the events of my commute. For those interested, Nov was a 500km month with average ride speeds of 24kmph. Nothing to write home about, but there it is anyway.

So something happened yesterday that gives me fodder to write. two separate incidents of road rage made me a bit miffed.

First case was in the morning, I was in my regular route which has 2 nasty road diversions. It is not a big deal but requires that I do an orchestrated jig to make sure I am visible to the drivers and I get my right of passage through the traffic signals. I was into the jig mid way, taking the lane, waving my hands, making myself look big, When I realized there was this white subaru (not the cops, they tend to use white subaru’s too) tailgating me, and sticking to my wheel like he wanted to pass me on a slip stream. It is one of those with the nearly illegal dark windshields and nearly black windows. It could have been a ninja but there is a higher probability of it being a beng (Note wiki shows a certain racist slur in here, but really, there is a beng in every social setup and a beng is a beng regardless of race).

What do you do when tailgated? Well, stick to your lane, and be predictable. Nothing works better. The downside is that once in a while you will get some ass like the one this morning, who passionately dole out their ignorance. He did it in abundance when he eventually passed me, unwound his windows and shouted that I had no right to be on the road. Sigh, man, I wonder how do these fellers get their licenses when they don’t seem to know the basic idea of who can and cannot use the roads.

The case 2 in point happened in the evening. I was heading back and almost home when a lorry passed inches away from me, I could feel the wind when the rear view mirror passed literally an inch from my ears. I usually am alright when people pass me close by but when 2 lanes are empty and the lorry rides inches past me at 50 kmph, I would like to voice out my opinion in the matter. I did with a Loud ‘oye’. Technically, it is just to vent the frustration and to relax the adrenalin glands and it does nothing else as the driver is oblivious listening to loud music in the cocoon of his car. Tonight was different, teh lorry was riding with windows down and he got my opinion loud and clear. He immediately stopped a few meters in front and waited for me to pass by for a confrontation.

Note, he was not in a hurry, so there is lesser reason for him to ride like a maniac.

Since I was near home, I figured I can take the opportunity to educate the feller. The conversation, however, went like this:

Me: Yo, can you make sure you give me space.

Him: You, you, why do you shout.

Me: Damn it man, you were an inch away from me, I have to get your attention. Now that I have survived, make sure you give others space while on the road.

Him (getting angrier): Why, Why did you shout. I did not hit you…

Me (flabbergasted, thinking WTF): …

How can I make an argument with some one whose case is that Since he did not physically injure me, he should not be subjected to criticism. Yikes. I hope these guys get their licenses revoked.

On a separate incident, I saw this lady drove into my lane like it was her Granny’s road. She did not bother signalling or slowing down, but she had a nice sticker on the rear window that screamed:

“Lady Driver – Please be considerate”

I don’t know, may be she thought that sticker was a license for her to behave like an idiot and get away with it. May be I should have a sticker on my back and then people will behave better. Who knows. stranger things have happened.

Well it was unplanned, happenstance and I did not have a decent camera either… But some pictures none the less.

Ok, after the recent announcement from apple on HDR photography, alien subspecies in small planets near Betelgeuse have an awareness of HDR and are probably shooting exclusively in HDR. Probably there is a revolt somewhere that the professional camera makers are not including it along with the kitchen sink in their cameras.

Well, I am pretty excited to be able to expand the Dynamic range of the iPhone by cool software tricks and to me HDR it is a welcome feature. It is really impressive that the iphone is able to capture multiple frames in a really short burst and process them in mere seconds. This is really mind boggling. But the trick with photography has always been the ability to understand and use the camera as a tool and HDR is not an exclusion. One needs to understand there is a time and place for using it and it should be used with care (and understanding). Here is a sample image I shot, hoping HDR will help me get some details in the shadows, Here are the results.

You can click through to see reasonable sized images in  new window.

First off, the HDR version (full image) has indeed ‘brightened’ the shadow areas. Look particularly at the front wall of the church and the flowers in the foreground. But I do not particularly like the ‘processing’ the camera has captured very little details to begin with and the HDR algorithm seems to have eaten a lot more of the details. It should be noted that the processing of HDR is kind of arty-farty right now and it requires a quite a bit of judgement to merge the images to make them look natural. It is no wonder that decent HDR packages cost upwards of 100$. I am sure there will be a lot of research on improving the standard algo and in time the merging will get a lot better, but I do not like what I see now

In the second row, I picked a crop of the clouds along with a church steeple. You can see there is a little more discernable details in the clouds in the HDR. That is nice and the blues in the sky were a bit darker too. but it seems that there is  a bit of visible noise introduced in the image. You might also notice a bit of ghosting in the steeple in the HDR. This is because to capture HDR, they shoot 3 images in sequence with different exposures and merge them. Now the 3 images are shot sequentially and quickly but they are different exposures. This means that a bit of hand shake, moving objects etc will confuse the algorithm and the merging will have to guess what to keep or to average (or dodge or multiply or whatever else) the local perturbation. The result is ghosting. I found this pretty bad with people moving around. Now it is not a deficiency of the algo, I am just saying that one has to take care of this issue.

You will notice the issue pretty pronounced in the clock crop. The strong contrast seems to have messed up the internals of the HDR algo. *Geek* I am guessing there is a global translation / rotation transform that is applied at the point of merging. I can think of a slightly more process intensive solution, by applying a sequence of local corrections.. But it would take more processing time and one has to balance time with quality *Geek*. As you can see the Standard version actually preserved a lot more of the details. I am also guessing that the lens is of a standard aperture and the camera captures 3 images at the same shutter speed but different ISO which might explain the pronounced noise in the HDR image…

Lastly, the centre crop is what I shot the HDR for: A bit more details of the inside of the church. As you can see the exposure adjustment is probably not very pronounced, there is very little details brought out in the shadow. The Mid-tones have been pretty strongly influenced but the shadows are not touched at all. It is a bummer, but an understandable tradeoff, pulling a lot out of the shadows will make things more difficult for the algo to work with and the results will be very unnatural too. But when I look at the loss of details in the flowers, I regret shooting this in HDR. ugh…

I guess my point is this. HDR is a cool idea but it is not a cure all for thinking about the scene before shooting. I will use the feature but am going to switch on the ‘settings’ for keeping the standard image. Now that iPhone has implemented this, I expect every phone camera to update their software and some geeky app will allow you to tweak a lot of parameters too. The algorithm will improve a lot over time, thats for sure. But it is going to be just another tool in a decent photographers kit.