Blog Merge and Site Feed

This is a blogger feature I was waiting for since a while. It is now possible to export a whole blog to an XML file, download it to a local hard drive and import it to other blogs. This can be another of your blogger.com blogs or even (if I got this right) another blog-provider.
Fact is, I actually had some older posts on other blogs that I created for a reason that I don't understand anymore. If you have several blogs on your blogger dashboard and want to merge them, this is what you have to do:
Currently you have to log in to http://draft.blogger.com. There you will find links for export and import on the "Settings | Basic" tab of each blog. It's that easy.
First I was afraid it would also export template information and mess up things, but there was no problem.
As a result, in the archive on the bottom of this page are now 137 additional old posts listed. Starting from the very first post in May 2006. It also imported all the old comments from these times which count 332, so my blog is basically complete now.
And to make Snirgel happy, I also added links to the post feed and comment feed, maybe you wish to subscribe, too.

Photography – Video Convergence

In the past few days more and more articles came to my attention that mentioned the merge of still image cameras and video cameras in their headlines. I'm not too much into gadgets so I ignored all those articles. Everything merges all the time: cameras, phones, music players, etc.. I simply find it tyring to jump on new technological gimmicks. Most things are obsolete before they are established and when ever cameras are merged with something small and gadgetry, the image quality is terrible, so why bother?
My preferred source for photo-talk is Dave Beckerman's blog, he is an excellent blogger and I read him daily. So did I today and when reading one of the comments on a recent post, I found a link that ultimately reminded me that the still image/video merge is serious.
With 'serious' I mean quality. One of Canon's upcoming digital SLRs seems to be having outstanding video capabilities. What the heck!? It's an SLR!
If you click the link below you will see a little movie that was made by Vincent Laforet with a pre-production Canon EOS 5D II. Nothing in this video has been post-processed.
He also shows still images taken with the camera during production. If you have a close look at the un-processed ISO-1600 and ISO-3200 images, one can see that the 21 mega pixel sensor hardly produces any noise. I don't like tech-talk too much, but this is big.

Link to the video named "Reverie".
Link to the still images.

1x.com aka Onexposure.net

I've found another gem in the wide universe of photography hosting/community platforms: onexposure.net (link)
Just as seen-by (link) it only shows work that has been screened by the 'staff'. seen-by really shows interesting things, but I have the feeling that Onexposure puts the bar a little higher. Maybe it's just my personal taste, but I literally chocked over my food when I first noticed the density of perfect work on that page :-)
For the first time since a long while I actually felt inspired to go out and do something creative with my camera, which might have also to do with the fact that this humid summer is finally vanishing, but that's another story.
So, besides being impressed, what is my personal experience with onexposure so far? I uploaded one of my pictures (Stairway to Hell) and gave a little artistic description. It got accepted, which was followed by a warm welcome by several other users.
You can find it here (link).
An for completeness: My current seen-by portfolio is here (link).

Lower Manhattan Pano

Starting at what point is a panorama a panorama? This one is made of two images stitched together with the tape of love...sticky stuff.
OK, actually, this is done with the new photo merge tool of Photoshop CS3, it does the stitching very well. If you find this picture too blue, let me tell you, it's not the software's fault.