At the moment I am getting quite a lot of hits on my Blog post about my cycle ride up the route of the Cambridge Guided Busway (CGB). I am not very sure why - but today in the local newspaper - the Cambridge Evening News, well on their website actually, was an article on "Guided busway path hit by freezing floods". As you might expect I was not the only one to notice that in places the path alongside the Busway had both flooded and frozen in places. According to the article the cycleway/pathway/bridleway also has a role as a service path and that the path was not actually open to the public yet. Judging by the number of users when I was on it - not everyone is aware of that fact. Even the OS map is confusing as it shows bits around Fen Drayton as public paths which is where there is flooding. However other bits aren't shown as being paths at the moment. The Sustrans website does show it as being "open".
My two-pennyworth - the route of the CGB provides a welcome leisure amenity as well as a transport route. Rarely does something of this magnitude get built without some teething problems - the real test will be how the Council move forward from here. At least has a dual use and I am sure that the buses that use it will not be as unpleasant as cycling alongside a busy road. (Well I hope that will be the case). It also means that cyclists (and other users for that matter) will not have the worry of being passed with inches to spare by motorists.
I was always taught that it was better to focus on fixing problems that appointing blame - although a culture of learning from mistakes is also important. So let's hope that it gets sorted and maybe even tarmac'd and becomes a route as popular as the Bristol to Bath cycle path.
I have not been out cycling today - sorting out things, including problems with RSS feeds. However I did a bit more playing around with HDR - trying to squeeze more out of photographs by taking a range of exposures of the same scene and then re-combining the best bits. I tried using Photoshop Elements 8 (PSE8) - which has a Photomerge Exposure facility. I have set my camera to take up to 7 pictures with a range of exposures and as I have been taking pictures when cycling they have been handheld. So there is a little bit of wobble between subsequent exposures. I also noticed that as I was taking high resolution pictures and storing them in both "jpg" and "raw" formats my camera sometimes struggle to store the info on the memory card fast enough.
When combing these pictures using PSE 8 the effect was very blurry there might be a way to more intelligently combine the pictures but it was a bit disappointing. I then tried down loading a trial version of PhotomatixPro3. The results are shown below - although I have yet to really try all the bells and whistles. All I did really was open the program and read in the pictures. I am impressed with the results - the trial version watermarks the output - but I am thinking of getting a full copy. The one on the right is the HDR version. I have bought a licence and replaced the photographs.
The first one is the "ideal" exposure with some tweaking, the second picture combines the results of 7 different exposures.
I will try some different picture before I commit - but I think it does a good job of taking pictures in the snow. It is really only suitable for fixed scenes I guess - but even then there might be some interesting results.
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