k6ka's blog about anything!

A couple days ago my mother emailed me a link to this article : Already I had some major  suspicions about the article just by looking at the headline. "A third of what's on Wikipedia"? What ?! It wasn't until I started seeing links to the article pop up elsewhere on the Internet that I decided to write a response to that email (yes, as you can see, I am an evil and ungrateful son that doesn't respond to half of his mother's emails). I wrote it in a jiffy without much editing or polish of any sort, so it may be rough around the edges, but I hope I got the point across. Here's what I wrote in the email: The article's title is very misleading. 3 million edits to Wikipedia is not the same as 3 million articles, and an edit is counted as whenever you make changes to an article and then click the "Publish changes" button. An "edit" on Wikipedia is considered a technical term and not one of work ethic or merit. It does not take...

I've been using the Vibrance HDR app for a few weeks now, and though it is fairly simplistic in its offerings, it does the job quite well, actually, and I highly commend the app developer for making such a reliable app that gets the job done  in under 10 MB! The app is built to work well with OpenCamera's Exposure Bracketing option, although I've successfully been able to get it to process images taken by my DSLR as well. It can support up to 7 different exposures to create a working HDR image; however, this depends on your phone's specs. My phone unfortunately doesn't have a lot of RAM (only 2 GBs) so I was limited to the minimum of just three. Still, it accomplishes what it sets out to do: be a true HDR app that merges exposures (rather than the "fake HDR" method of applying whacky filters) with not too many extras. There are some basic post-processing sliders you can use to adjust the image, but it doesn't beat further editing in a proper image ed...

View on  Flickr  and  DeviantArt . Sometimes, great scenes for photography happen out of the blue and at seeming random. Most of the time, I let these scenes pass, and although I sometimes feel like kicking myself for failing to even take out my camera to capture a great scene, I usually forgive myself within a few minutes and acknowledge the fact that I can't capture every single moment in life. And that's okay! This photo was taken just outside the Bishop Avenue entrance to Finch subway station, right by the GO/YRT bus terminal, on January 11. I had just come out of the subway when I spotted the scene, and liked it so much that I immediately took my phone out to capture it. I took three exposure bracketed shots that didn't have the TTC bus in the background, then took an HDR one that my phone processed on the spot, which had a bit of motion blur that I didn't mind. I'm not too good with photo editing, but I think I touched it up pretty well for this one. Wha...

For Android users interested in using their smartphones for photography, I highly recommend getting the  OpenCamera  app. It really is one of the better camera apps out there that's for people serious about photography and contains quite a lot of handy features, although its functionality may be limited depending on the device you have and how stingy the manufacturer was at limiting third-party camera apps. One of the neatest features I recently discovered on the app is an Automatic Exposure Bracketing mode. OpenCamera has an HDR mode too that does the same thing but processes the images for you on the spot. For a long time, this was fine for me, since I wasn't really good at image editing, but now that I have PhotoDirector 5 and its amazing Bracket HDR feature (that's pretty darn simple to use!) I appreciated having this feature right on my phone when my Nikon D60 lacked it. The Exposure Bracketing option in the OpenCamera app. For those who aren't so familiar w...