Although many TUAW contests are limited to North American participants, here's a contest sponsored by a Belgian Mac development firm that is open to everybody!

Creaceed's Hydra 1.6 software is a Leopard-only solution for creating HDR (High Dynamic Range) photographs. If you're not familiar with HDR photography, it's a way of creating photographs that are closer to what the human eye actually sees (view Flickr gallery). To do this, you take two or more photos of the same scene; some are overexposed, some underexposed, some are just right.

For example, if you see a beautiful sunset with your own eyes, you can see details in both the sunset and the surrounding landscape. Since digital camera CCDs don't have the same dynamic range as your eyes, photos of the sunset usually show the landscape as being too dark. If you get the landscape "right", the sunset is washed out.

Hydra takes those photographs, aligns them, and then performs some algorithmic magic to create HDR images that are perfectly exposed across the entire photograph.

If you got a new digital camera for Christmas, give Hydra a try, and then enter your best HDR images into Creaceed's contest. Entry details can be found here -- good luck!

• Canon EOS 5D Mark II
• Canon PowerShot G10
• Pentax K2000/K-m
• Leaf AFi-II 6
• Leaf AFi-II 7
• Leaf Aptus-II 6
• Leaf Aptus-II 7
• Leica M8.2

• Canon EOS 50D
• Nikon D90
• Sony DSLR-A900
• Nikon Coolpix P6000

• Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS/Kiss Digital F/1000D
• Kodak DCS Pro SLR/n
• Nikon D700
• Olympus EVOLT E-420
• Olympus EVOLT E-520
• Olympus SP-570
• Samsung GX-10
• Samsung GX-20
• Sony DSLR-A300
• Sony DSC-R1

Picking just three favorite Mac applications was harder than I thought it would be. I decided to forgo anything that was either built-in or part of a major productivity or creative suite and just focus on applications that make my Mac computing experience unique and complete.

Coda

Even before this week's 1.5 update, Coda had a permanent spot on my "favorite app" list. For me, when it comes to developing or maintaining a web project, Coda is just the best. Sure, TextMate (which I'm using to type this post) might be superior if you're looking for just a source-code editor. CSSEdit might be a better CSS editor, Panic's own Transmit is a more robust FTP client. Coda is still the best all-around web development app for my workflow. It lets me access all the files for a project, locally or on a server, make the changes or additions I want to make, preview how it will look in Safari (or with one click, open it in Firefox, Opera, Camino or OmniWeb) and immediately execute any changes. And now I can use it as a Subversion client too. Even better, it is a distinctly "Mac" application. Every UI detail reminds me why I love the Mac and why OS X is the best platform for software around.

Aperture 2

While Lightroom 2 is really, really nice (and I prefer it for some types of retouches), Aperture 2 is simply my favorite photo editing and photo management tool. I'm not a professional photographer, I don't even have a high-end DSLR -- just a tiny 8 megapixel Nikon that fits in my purse or the back-pocket of my jeans -- but I still want my photographs to look their best. iPhoto is great, but I need more precision. Aperture 2 lets me fine-tune my images, whether from my digital camera or scanned in from some of my older SLRs, crop them, adjust noise levels and color and just generally make everything prettier. The Photo Book I made for my mom for Mother's Day this year, using Aperture 2, was amazing and brought tears and smiles to both of my parents' faces. Their reaction was worth far more than the price of the software.

MarsEdit

Although I can't really use it for most of my WIN blogging, MarsEdit is the tool I use to publish to any of my other sites. My personal site runs on WordPress, and while I love the software, I detest its write interface. I know plenty of people like it, I just don't like composing everything in a web form. MarsEdit's Preview mode is a great way to see how something will look before it's published, whether I use HTML or Markdown or Textile. If I need to edit an old entry, I don't have to worry about sifting through the "visual" or "code" view, inadvertently breaking something if I change a URL. Integrating media from Flickr or uploading new images is seamless. MarsEdit just makes my life easier.

• Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi/Kiss Digital x2/450D
• Epson R-D1
• Leaf AFi 7
• Leaf AFi 6
• Leaf AFi 5
• Pentax K200D
• Pentax K20D