Say what you like about Vista, but one ace up is sleeve is definitely the ability to play Crysis using DirectX 10. Eye candy indeed, and an astonishing feat of programming.

I was intrigued to notice in the game's title sequence the other day that the island setting for the game is not too far off the coast of Korea. Coincidentally the venue for the upcoming SC 34 meeting is Jeju Island, and as I write I am in that state of nervous excitement that precedes any long trip. From leaving the front door it is going to be over 20 hours before setting foot in the meeting hotel. If everything goes smoothly.

On a personal level I am expecting (hoping) to hear less at this meeting about OOXML than in the last few, and to be able to return to the important infrastructure XML standards (and in particular DSDL) that first lured me into International standardisation.

So, no nanosuit required ... we shall see ...

In a comment to my last blog entry, Lars Marius Garshol, wondered whether the DxO Optics Pro software I was using was any good at recovering “lost” or “blown” highlights – bright areas of an image which all get maxxed out and appear as pure white. Here’s a simple experiment to see how it performs.

The first thing I discovered is that the “highlight preservation” feature is not enabled unless processing a RAW image, so with some trepidation (am I entering the dark side?), I set my DSLR to take NEF+JPEG, stuck it out of the window and took a couple of shots of Cambridge back gardens with a load of cloudy sky in view.

The result out of the camera was as expected: much of the cloudy sky simply showed as white:




Taking the NEF equivalent image and processing it through DxO Optics Pro with “highlight preservation – strong” selected yielded the following result (tip: if you're viewing this on a less-than-stellar LCD screen which is not good at displaying subtly-differentiated highlights, try tilting it to get an appreciation of what information has been retrieved):



A striking improvement I’d say. From thinking that RAW was an unwarranted nuisance, from now I’m going to set my camera to take JPEG+RAW so that similarly lost highlights can be recovered if need be for interesting pictures. After it, if it looks better – that’s what matters.

Of course the purist might say it would be better to get the exposure right to start with – but in many daylight conditions the light contrasts are just too strong for the sensor on a digital camera to be able to cope – film is better for that right now.

One of my more fun activities this year has been getting used to a super wide angle lens, the Sigma 10-20mm f4-5.6 EX DC HSM to be precise. This is designed for cropped-sensor DSLRs and on my Nikon D50 with its 1.5x crop this focal range is equivalent to 16mm for a traditional full frame 35mm lense - in other words, wide.

To get an idea of how wide, here are two pictures of the same scene (the light looked interesting at 07:30 this morning, so I headed into town to get these pictures). The first is taken with the 18-55mm kits lens that came with the Nikon, at its widest zoom setting of 18mm (equivalent to 28mm in old money).




Now here is the same scene at 10mm with the Sigma.




Obviously one gets a lot more in with the wider lens, but this picture also serves to illustrate one of the big challenges of using a super-wide -- composition becomes much more challenging. Discovering the punts along the left hand side of the image was good, but the strip of field on the left adds nothing. A continual hazard of using very wide angle views is that one gets a load of extraneous junk in the edges of the picture. Photography guru Ken Rockwell has recently written a fascinating piece in which he states the purpose of a super-wide is to get closer to the subject, rather than to "get it all in", and he has some compelling images to support his case.

Some other interesting things I found with life at 10mm:

• If the sky is at all interesting, you get full value
• Distortion can be fun and dramatic, but if you aren't very careful to keep your horizon level you'll get some nasty distortion which is hard to correct
• At tourist sites having a wider lense allows one to stand forward of everybody else taking pictures - nicer shots without flourescent anoraks in view

Distortion

The Sigma 10-20mm is a relatively inexpensive lens, and has its faults including vignetting and all kinds of distortion. The end result is not helped when the person behind the camera (me) often fails to get the exposure just right. I use a fabulous piece of software called DxO Optics Pro to help to compensate. The developers have analysed the optical performance of many camera/lense combinations (you have to specify what you have when installing the application), and using this data the application modules will automatically correct lense distortion when it processes images. It is also possible to correct for some geometric distortion by drawing parallel lines onto things in the source image which should be parallel. The results look pretty good to me and best of all the app seems to have the knack of adjusting brightness intelligently to rescue what might seem hopeless under-exposed or over-contrasty pictures.

I wonder (heretical thought) if a cheapo lens and decent software outperforms more expensive optics -- it's not as if any super-wide lens is going to be optically perfect, after all ...

Groklaw has published a leaked ISO document to the web regarding the ongoing appeals over the 29500 project. Reading it, it is clearly not (as originally reported) the recommendation of the ISO TMB, but recommendations to the TMB. The appeals process continues.

Bearing in mind the fuss that was made about "form letters" earlier in the project, something new that immediately leaps off the pages is some common text in two of the appeals:

From SABS (South Africa; letter dated 22 May) :


From FONDONORMA (Venezuela; letter dated 30 May):


Both NBs were asked to specify what specific remedial actions they were seeking and ISO got (among other things), from Venezuela (letter dated 23 June):


and from South Africa (letter dated 24 June)


As with the "duplicate" comments submitted in the 29500 letter ballot, it's difficult to know how this happened. Is one country copying the other, or is there a common source for both? One would have thought any self-respecting standards body would not brazenly crib the text of an appeal (an appeal!) from outside its own walls ...

- Alex.

Alan Bryden, the ISO Secrerary General, has made some press comments about the OOXML standardisation project, which make interesting reading for those who have been following along. After noting the wrong-headedness of much of the anti-ISO commentary, he is quoted as saying of the standards process:


This is surely the key point: where there are improvements to be made, then the system admits for that change.

It is also noted that ISO/IEC 29500 is not the first controversial project ISO has had to deal with. I am told by ISO veterans that the recent fuss was mild compared to that surrounding ISO 10990-4, for example...