You can find the rest of the photos at Flickr.

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“So smooth, it was like sliding in a drawer. That’s how one local news organization described the delicate process of rolling in a new 6,500-ton segment of the upper deck of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge over Labor Day weekend. The operation also was remarkably fast, with the installation taking a little under three hours, about half the time originally predicted. In fact, nearly every aspect of the complex retrofit-by-replacement just to the east of the Yerba Buena Island Tunnel was so well-orchestrated that Caltrans and the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA) were able to shave 11 hours off the schedule, and reopen the bridge to traffic at 6 p.m. on Labor Day proper — far ahead of the original deadline of 5 a.m. on Tuesday.”

Link to Article, Link to Video (from BoingBoing)

1. 

   A chapel in London carried a ingenious technological advancement that I didn’t even know existed. The church features a hydraulic coffin lift to facilitate funerary service.

   Link to Article

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2. 

   This article features a series of photos that document the demolition of a nuclear facility in Scotland. Ironically (in light of the previous link), the name of the plant is Chapelcross.

   Link to Article

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3. 

   Our final link today comes from treehugger. If the picture seems familiar, perhaps you should see the inspiration for this new project in Dubai:

   

   Yes, the designer was inspired to create a building that is based on the Death Star from the Star Wars films.

   Link to Article

If you’ve seen a particularly eye-popping, out-of-this-world night photograph of a city skyline, or a particularly apocalyptic cloudscape with cartoonish color saturation making the rounds on blogs lately, there’s a good chance it was made using high-dynamic-range imaging, or HDR software. And while these images may look like the work of a pro photographer, or at least a seasoned digital-imaging or special-effects expert, the tools to easily make your own amazing HDR images are widely (and in some cases freely) available.
So what exactly comprises an HDR image? Basically, more information per pixel. When you take a photo with your digital camera, the colors are converted to accommodate the limited palette of your display or a piece of photo paper. The human eye, however, is capable of taking in far more color and light information at any given time. This is why it’s necessary to take a photo with the correct exposure settings—what your eye sees as a uniform scene with a balanced brightness and color range needs to be regulated to fit within the more limited range of your camera’s sensor, or else the image will appear under- or overexposed (too dark or too light).

HDR provides a way to combine a range of exposures of the same scene into one image, adding significantly to the amount of data held per pixel (most digital images hold 8 bits of color information per pixel; an HDR image has 32). The result is an image with more “dynamic range”—in other words, the brights are brighter, the darks darker, and there’s much more variance in between.

Link to Article

This comes from the flickr stream of one known as phrenologist. This is a picture of a replica of a Sopwith Camel posed on the faux runway atop a building in Manhattan.

Link to Article

Link to Slideshow, from digg

HDR, or high dynamic range imagery is a relatively new concept that is taking the photography world by storm. These hyper-realistic images are actually composites of multiple photos or images that are combined in digital imaging software to extend the dynamic range of the subject in a manner that is similar to the way a human eye sees. The shadows, midtones and highlights all show breathtaking detail.

The techniques used to produce these images have been around for some time, but advances in software, hardware and some heavy-hitting plugs from leading tech resources have turned HDR into quite the fad in the last year. The image above is a picture of the Tokyo nightscape taken using multiple exposures from a high end digital SLR camera and composed using image editing software. The actual process involves something called tone-mapping which converts the image into a file that can be displayed on something less dynamic, such as a computer monitor.

• Link via Digg
• Link to How-to Article
• Link to HDR Flickr Pool