Terrainscan.com

Exclusive Artists:100% Royalty Day Payment

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Hellooooo Exclusive Artists: iStock pays out $200k

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iStock's got back

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Growing pains: pruning the iStock garden

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Punctum Award winners announced

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Uploads Unavailable This Weekend

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Payoneer Scheduled Downtime

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Punctum Award finalists revealed

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Fractal Flames, electric smoke and digital nebulae

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I've always been inspired by those screensavers that display digital nebulas called fractal flames. Fractal Flames are algorithmically generated images.

Last month I discovered a flame renderer (flam3) for unix/os x and got myself a new hobby rendering electric smoke, digital nebulae or fractal flames. Fractal flames take many shapes, the first results are in the flam3 gallery on my site.

New website layout terrainscan.com

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After experimenting with different php blogs and galleries. I've totaly switched to a Flash interface for presenting my images. Have a look at the new interface and give it a try!

New MacBook Pro

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A couple weeks ago, my shiny new MacBook Pro arrived! What a difference a new Mac makes! Pretty soon - when I'm done playing- I'll be uploading new pictures. Pro style (:

Free vector of the month

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My isometric village was free vector of the month!

Merging your photo's into panorama's

4RN01D — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 02:35:14 +0100

The photomerge feature in Photoshop helps you create panoramas. It automaticaly stiches overlapping photo's creating very large and impressive images. By shooting someone or something on different places and stiching them into one big image is even more fun.

An important thing you should think of when shooting several images is to try to get similar lighting conditions across all your images. You can't use the camera's auto setting as it wil adjust the exposure for each image as you move further or closer to the sun (or any other lightsource). I usualy just set the aperture and shutterspeed and keep them unchaged while shooting a serie of pictures for the panorama.

Avoid the auto setting for your camera and take all the images from the same point. The images should overlap between 15-40%. Too much or too little overlap will make it difficult to match the images.

This image (cropped) was created using several photo's of Bas and Sophie walking in the grassfields. Full panorama can be seen on flickr

Fractal flam3

4RN01D — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 10:16:22 +0100

Getting close using a poor man macro lens

4RN01D — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 10:16:46 +0100

A reversed 50 mm lens allows you to enlarge the realy small plants and animals you were otherwise unable to capture. Without an expensive macro lens. This gallery shows the result of my experiments using the reverse lens technique.

Macro photography is a lot of fun. Objects look very different when you view them up close, and the most ordinary things often make the most surprising close-ups. Miniature landscapes come to life when pointing the lens at small plants like Bryum moss and very small spiders reveal their beautiful patterns unable to see with the naked eye.

Good macro SLR lenses are expensive, but reversing a regular 50mm using a 'coupling ring' or 'reverse lens ring' get's you close for a lot less. Hence the expression 'poor man's macro'.

In this gallery I'm using a single 50 mm lens only. I've glued a filter ring onto a camera mount ring. This way you can screw the lens on the filter-ring side an attach the front of the lens onto the camera instead of using the normal mount.

Another way to perform reverse lens macro photography is by having a lens attached to the camera (primary lens) and then holding reverse lens in front of the camera mounted lens (secondary lens). The lens attached to the camera should then be a longer focus (telelens) while the secondary lens should be a shorter focal length (50 mm).

Some of my macro photos are also availible through istockphoto.com