Upgrading SSD in Apple MacBook Pro Retina (Late 2012)

For some time now, I have hit the storage limit on the 256GB SSD in my Late 2012 Apple MacBook Pro Retina. I’ve needed to move a significant chunk of data to external drives, which impedes access and frankly is a pain in the butt. I’ve considered a number of methods to upgrade the SSD, but Apple decided to use a proprietary connector for the SSD (rather than using the mSATA or, more recently, the M.2 standards), which has made upgrading more difficult/expensive than it should be. However, even though there were a few minor roadblocks, I ended up successfully upgrading the SSD using a combination of 3rd party modules. Since I could not find anecdotal reports of similar upgrades, I wanted to throw mine out into the ether.
Read More

Magic Lantern HDR video to tonemapped video with MATLAB scripts

I have a Canon T3i with a Canon EF 50mm f1.4 lens that I use for the gross majority of my day-to-day photography these days. I’ve been using a custom firmware for the Canon called Magic Lantern that provides a some interesting (and useful!) functions. One of them is HDR video. Here’s a beautiful example of what can be done:

I tried my hand at processing the HDR video output and was able to get a reasonably nice tone-mapped video:

After the break, you’ll find how I processed the initial Magic Lantern video using MATLAB and exiftool and tone-mapped the output using Luminance HDR.

Read More