I spent last weekend in Gettysburg, PA for a wedding and did some touring of the Gettysburg National Military Park and downtown Gettysburg. The first image above is of the McPherson Barn, one of many locations of conflict in the Battle of Gettysburg, the second is a scene of an alley in town. Both images fitting on this Memorial Day. See all of my photos from the trip in this Flickr set.

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking to the great crowd at the New York Web Performance Group Meetup. Fellow presenter Marco Carag (Front End Manager at The Knot) laid down a strong foundation with a discussion of where HTML and CSS sit on the Progressive Enhancement ladder. Following that I came in and talked about JavaScript’s different roles in PE, client side performance, and browser support of upcoming Web Standards. Here’s the slide deck from my portion of the presentation:

This year was the third time I’ve taken photographs at the spring classic car show in the neighboring town of Millburn.

I saw this wall by Shepard Fairey of Obey Giant and the Obama Hope poster fame whlie killing time before the NYC.js meeting last Thursday. Check all the detail in the large size photo

There’s been lots of buzz surrounding Content Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5 but I’ve seen a bit less about the updates to the photo merge and HDR features. These were the tools I was most interested in taking for a spin when I installed the upgraded applications. If they delivered at making it easy to create High Dynamic Range Photographs, particularly that are more photorealistic then fantastical and candied looking, then it would save me from buying other apps to do that processing or forgetting the genre existed all together.

After watching a video of the new HDR Pro features and some desire to play with new toys firmly seeded I decided to rattle off a few bracketed exposures while in Central Park earlier this week and give the new HDR Pro a spin. I hadn’t gone out intending to shot for HDR and without a tripod the handheld, roughly steadied and quickly taken photos aren’t the best platform to use for an analysis of the application. Still, I have to say I was really happy with the results and the lack of manual input and fighting in the process. Features like image alignment and the new ghost removal features performed better then expected and gave me passable results.

I’ll leave the in depth analysis and comparison between tools to other people, but I thought it would be helpful to others to see a quick rundown of my proces to create the two photographs featured.