Somehow we got on the topic of dSLRs, with the upshot being that we might actually own one of these expensive beasts. And so because it's the kind of thing I love doing, and the kind of thing Maddy hates doing, it was my "job" to figure out which would be the best one to get ( Read more... )

In a couple of weeks, Maddy and I will be going on a cruise to Cabo San Lucas. This is partly because our sister and soon-to-be brother-in-law, Christa and Ryan, will be getting married on said cruise ship before it embarks, and invited us to go with them on the cruise that followed, and partly because it's an excuse to spend the better part of a ( Read more... )

First, start by finding five pictures that you'd never inteded to fuse into a panorama, but later discovered that they actually fit together as one.

I was in Sausalito with Maddy, a bit over two years ago. Looking out over the waterfront, we saw an old fashioned tall ship out on the water, across the bay near San Francisco. As it got closer I ( Read more... )

So, quite a few years ago, back when I still lived in San Diego, I took a series of pictures of the La Jolla Cliffs with the intention of using them to create a panorama. But the pictures had some serious flaws, as far as panoramas are concerned, and after a couple of attempts, I decided it would never happen. For one thing, this was when I was ( Read more... )

After my forays into the world of HDR photos yesterday, I wanted to see if the same process could work starting from just one photo.

Previously, I had taken three pictures of the same thing, and then combined them. But would it work to start with a single picture, and then enhance it via similar means?

As it turns out, yes.

( read more to see how this works )

( see how these... )

I just put together a couple of albums of old pictures culled from the depths of my hard drive. They're on facebook, but apparently non-facebook users can still access them.

here's da links!

old stuff

older stuff

both albums are mostly chronological. and pedantically annotated.

I found a good use for the liquid rescaling I mentioned in my previous entry.

I had taken a vertical panorama of a Sequoiadendron giganteum while we were in Calaveras Big Tree State Park a few weeks ago, and had been struggling with the fact that it panorama just didn't do it justice. Depending on how I projected and cropped it, it either came ( Read more... )

After figuring out the ins and outs of Hugin, the open source panorama stitcher, I perused the net a bit looking at what other people had to say about the same software, and I came across this fascinating video:

Click to view

Now I don't know about the code itself, but on a conceptual level, this process is nothing short of brilliant. It simply fascinates me, ( Read more... )

Here's another old photoset I can finally stitch into the panorama it was intended for: the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden.

the photos were taken last spring.

Here's a standard sort of projection (equirectilinear)

( Read more... )