Category: photo

points you see, points you don’t

So I’m busy doing windfarm photomontages in hugin. Trouble is, the site I’m working on is in the prairies, so here’s some ASCII art of what I’m seeing:

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This, as you might guess, is just a little short of control points for stitching images. I find myself scrabbling for clods of earth, interesting blades of grass, and what looks worryingly like roadkill by the side of the range roads to use as common points of interest.

So far, though, most of the panoramas have come out looking pretty good. But then, I am 1337 VV1NDF4R^^ D3516N0R …

art by the wayside

top picture
Dumped by the side of the CN “GECO” spur by our house: three paintings on fibre board, in acrylics. Unsigned. They seemed to appear this morning.

Further photos in my Found Art gallery

nice scaling

My Nikon D70 makes images that are too large for the web, so I have to scale them down. Most image scaling routines use simple linear interpolation, which can lose a lot of detail, but some packages use cubic scaling. This keeps most of the detail.

I was looking for a scriptable cubic routine, and I found it in Image::Magick, aka perlmagick. The syntax is simple:

$x = $image->Resize(geometry => '50%',
                    filter => 'Cubic');

I used this routine to resize my 2004 Ontario Renfest pictures.

photo printers

I want to print some of my D70 pictures, so I asked the GTABloggers what they used:

I’m looking for a non-proprietary upload system, so Ofoto is out. I’d like to try photocentre.ca, but I know no-one who has tried them.

whew!

Well, as of noon, the Ontario Renewable Energy RFP deadline has passed. That means I can take a short break from wind farm design.

biggest vee-hickle ever

huge_lesabre.jpg
Seems it’s a big weekend down at the rental lot. This Buick LeSabre — approximately the size of Clackmannanshire, for Scottish readers — is all they had left.

Oh well, at least I’ll be stylin’ on the way to the Rennfest, and at the airport to meet Catherine. Or, since it’s about the size of a Zil, I guess I could be Stalin.

gone digital

I got rid of nearly all my film camera equipment yesterday. Digital was calling, and I was barely using what I had. To Burlington Camera, I traded in:

  • Cosina-Voigtländer Bessa R 35mm rangefinder outfit, comprising:
    • Bessa R 35mm rangefinder body
    • Ultron Aspherical 35mm-f/1.7 lens
    • Nokton Aspherical 50mm-f/1.5 lens
    • Apo Lanthar 90mm-f/3.5 lens
  • Pentacon Six TL outfit, comprising:
    • Pentacon Six TL MF SLR body
    • Carl Zeiss Jena Biometar MC 80mm-f/2.8 Lens
    • Pentacon Six TL WLF
    • Pentacon Six TL metered prism
    • Pentacon Auto extension tubes
  • Voigtländer Vitoret 110EL 110 camera outfit with matching V200 flash
  • Yashica Yashicamat MF TLR
  • Yashica Electro 35 GTN 35mm rangefinder camera
  • Olympus Stylus Epic Infiniti 35mm AF compact
  • Metz 20BC6 Flash

…  all towards a Nikon D70. I like it a lot.

There is some film equipment I kept, like the amazing 15mm f/4.5 SW Heliar lens. I even bought a Bessa L body from Cameraquest so I could keep using it with my Kaidan KiWi panoramic head. I also kept the Zero Image pinhole camera, as it’s too nice to sell.

Coming back from the camera store, the taxi driver was an artist fae Balornock. I guess there’s a lot more people fae Balornock than in Balornock.

Yay! Even better panoramas with enblend


(Click the image to see the original in its full 1.1MB, 7264 &times 992 glory.)

I’ve been working with Hugin for a while, but found its colour matching when stitching less than perfect. I just built and tried enblend, which promises much better quality stitching — at the cost of some serious CPU usage.

The above is 8 images, taken when standing at the near the bridge over the Ottawa River. It was handheld, with just a basic Nikon 2MP digicam in auto-everything mode. Can you see the joins?

Hugin just got a load easier to build on Gentoo. You no longer have to jump through hoops of tweaking source to get things to compile. I like the package a lot, and I look forward to using it with my Kaidan panoramic tripod head.

Images By File Number

Further to ‘The DSCN0001 Project’ yesterday, Ken suggested looking at CIMG0113.JPG from Casio cameras, as “… You might want to try a file a little higher in number. The first might not be very interesting for any camera, you know?” There is at least one blank CIMG0113 there, though.

James added that his method is to google for a topic that may have pictures of groups of people, distort the image in PhotoShop, then paint the results. Here’s an example: Sara @.

The DSCN0001 Project

dscn0001_project01.jpg
Digicams produce sequentially-numbered picture files. Every camera has taken a first picture, and quite frequently these pictures and their original file names make it onto the web.

Inspired by a conversation with James Dignan and Ken Weingold, the above is a collage of nine images originally named ‘dscn0001.jpg’ by the owners’ cameras. These thumbnails were found on Google Images, and have been scaled and tiled in a pseudo-random selection.

I don’t who these people are, or what the images are from. The selection and arrangement is arbitrary. The only thing that they have in common are the file names. Somehow, despite their differences, they are strangely related.