Christmas Presents
Now that all the recipients have now got them I can finally talk about the Christmas present that I gave my family (on my father's side).
As my father's side of the family is from Townsville when I went to Brisbane for OSDC it was very cheap (maybe ~$100) to fly up to Townsville first on the Friday before and have a weekend (which in the end included the election) with my grandparents.
On that day of national celebration where we started to get used to the idea of "Prime Minister Kevin Rudd" we went to the beach (Toolakea, north of Townsville) where my grandparents have a beach house. As it was a quiet afternoon I got out my camera and went for a walk. After a while I came across four trees out in the rocky shores that I quite liked as a photographic study and I decided to do a panorama.
This is a 1/16th scale version of the final image, with a 1/8th scale behind the link.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
The panorama creation was done with a wholly free software stack:
I spent most of the nights at OSDC playing with Hugin and generating my panorama, and then when I got back to Melbourne I went and got it printed at the local SNAP printing (It does look a lot better printed, although being ~1.5M wide helps) and framed at a place down the street from the office, and then had two shipped up to Townsville for the family up there. Unfortunately the glass on one was damaged, slightly scratching the print.
Lessons learnt:
As my father's side of the family is from Townsville when I went to Brisbane for OSDC it was very cheap (maybe ~$100) to fly up to Townsville first on the Friday before and have a weekend (which in the end included the election) with my grandparents.
On that day of national celebration where we started to get used to the idea of "Prime Minister Kevin Rudd" we went to the beach (Toolakea, north of Townsville) where my grandparents have a beach house. As it was a quiet afternoon I got out my camera and went for a walk. After a while I came across four trees out in the rocky shores that I quite liked as a photographic study and I decided to do a panorama.
This is a 1/16th scale version of the final image, with a 1/8th scale behind the link.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
The panorama creation was done with a wholly free software stack:
- GIMP with the UCRAW plugin to take the Canon RAW files and convert them into TIFF's
- Hugin for panorama stitching
- And back to gimp for some final exposure fixes and cropping
I spent most of the nights at OSDC playing with Hugin and generating my panorama, and then when I got back to Melbourne I went and got it printed at the local SNAP printing (It does look a lot better printed, although being ~1.5M wide helps) and framed at a place down the street from the office, and then had two shipped up to Townsville for the family up there. Unfortunately the glass on one was damaged, slightly scratching the print.
Lessons learnt:
- Switch to portrait orientation for a landscape panorama if you're only taking one row of images
- Get significant overlap at the ends of the image where angle changes may be more extreme
- Choose a marker point in the frame (for landscape panorama's try for a horizontal line)
- Switch the camera to full-manual first, I left it on aperture priority and you can still see where the camera changed shutter speeds
- You can *NEVER* have too much padding