Town Park, Revisited

Before I start: The first thing for a Wordpress user (no matter you are using self-hosted Wordpress or have a blog on Wordpress.com) to do today is to vote for Wordpress at Webware 100 Awards 2008! Being a blogger for almost 4 years (the exact 4 years is another 4 months away), Wordpress is so far the best publishing platform I’ve ever used. I did consider Livejournal and Greymatter at first, but then decided to start a blog with Blogger, and finally switching to self-hosted Wordpress on my blog’s first birthday. If you have time, do try to vote for other programmes and websites in other sections.

Okay done. So we’ll get started with my trip to the town park. It’s quite near my home – just a 5-minute cycle away. And to be more exact (I’ve measured using Google Earth!), according to my usual cycling path, it’s about 1.2km away. Sweet :mrgreen: I’ve decided to create a pseudo-HDR from a single JEPG photo shot over there – here’s a before and after illustration:

Click on the image to view the larger pseudo-HDR. Using the same colour burn and colour dodge technique again, Photoshop can really create wonders :D I think I should post another tutorial about creating pseudo or fake HDRs, heh. Anyway if you scrutinise closely you’ll spot some flaws in the resultant pseudo-HDR – there’s this annoying halo around the big tree on the right. I think I did a messy job trying to burn that area, because the sky needs to be colour burnt but the tree could or else it’ll show up even darker.

Oh, here’s a panorama, definitely one of the biggest I’ve posted so far. It’s a whooping 500kb huge, I’m really sorry for those with a slower connection. Scroll horizontally :razz:

Anyway before I end this post I would want to dedicate a whole paragraph to Ivy. Ivy runs a Wordpress blog which deals talks pretty much about CSS desgin, wordpress plugins and blogging tips. Her blog designs are seriously awesome (they even got featured on other CSS sites!), you should check out her blog template – the only one so far I’ve seen forgoing the entire sidebar :) She talked about interesting issues like getting blog templates to be cross-browser compliant, and also about TopHostingCenter’s Rudolph Plan which is a big bargain to the first 1000 customers who chooses it as their webhost :mrgreen: She also tells everyone what wordpress plugins she use, which I find very convenient and useful to wordpress bloggers. So far, I’ve downloaded and installed WP Threaded Comments and Author Highlight, both recommended by her. Thanks Ivy!