theSalmonFarm Blog » Photography

Microsoft freebie does very respectable photo stitching

Glen — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:58:54 +0000

s mentioned previously, I’ve been taking a number of fractional images and then having to stitch them together on the computer. I was using a utility that came with my Canon point-n-shoot. Simply put, I have not likes the results. But, given I am frugal (outside of the farmhouse project), I was not about to splurge on one of the nicer professional tools.

I found a solution with YAFMU- yet another free Microsoft utility. It’s called the Microsoft Image Composite Editor (the marketing guys had to work hard to make that name!).

First things first - it works.

To elaborate a bit - it does a rather good job, and given the price point I’d say it does an excellent job. In the example below, I threw 27 fames at it and didn’t both to tell it the layout. ICE took about 4 minutes to work everything out but the results can be seen. The only GIMP (aka the other Photoshop) work I did was to fill in a bit of sky that was missing (because I forgot to take one of the necessary frames) and fix a little parallax error. I should point out that ICE had to work hard to bend the images to line up so the parallax error was not the fault of ICE but rather the natural result of stitching a panning image.

WARNING: only click on the image if you have a high speed internet connection as the image is 8470×4494 pixels. I compressed it to 75% but that still leaves a 2.8MB file.

Seeing things in perspective

Glen — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 14:40:18 +0000

I’m often confronted with a scene that seems just a bit more than ordinary but I can’t put my finger on it. I sometimes try to capture it through photography, but the image seldom results in that same feeling I remember at the original moment. Over the past few days and nights, I’ve gone to the same places at the same times and repeated my shots, in the hope that I might find the settings needed to capture both the image and the feeling of “it’s just a little different”.

Here are three results. None of these have been “photoshopped” other than to crop, scale down the images for the blog, and add the drop-shadow effect.

The inspiration for this shot was two fold. First, the sodium vapor safety light is usually the bane of my existence at night when I want to look at the stars or just enjoy the general lack of man’s impact on the environment. However, the light is there and I can not turn it off so I thought how I might use it to my advantage. Shot at ISO1600, F8, 32 seconds.

This is not a trick and as noted, this is not a composite. The water in the creek for the past two mornings has been very still. In prior years this has lead me to take the “mirror image shot” where the top nearly perfectly matches the bottom. However, this time, I photographed only the bottom half - the reflection - and I turned my camera upside down. Shot at ISO800, F13, 1/750 sec.

Here is another example. Like the previous image, this was taken with my camera inverted. Shot at ISO800, F11, 1/500 sec.

With any luck, the end of a long week

Glen — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:59:12 +0000

With any luck, I will be “here” in a couple more hours …

FYI: This is a real image but my little point-and-shoot was not up to the task so I made this image using an old technique. If you are shooting a still scene and have a tripod, you can take several images and vary the aperture and shutter speed. This allows you to capture a larger dynamic range. You blend the layers together in GIMP or Photoshop or other editing tool and remove the blow-out of the hot photo and add the rest to the dark photo. the only catch, in this case, was the great white heron only appears in one frame so I had to make sure it was saved in the flattening of the layers.

Zen in the jungle

Glen — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:37:53 +0000

The geothermal tunnel

Glen — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:30:55 +0000

In the fullness of time, the farmhouse will have nearly 13 tons of HVAC system running. There is a 5 ton “heat-only” water-to-water exchanger to feed the radiant floor head in the house. Another 5 tons for heating the shop, and then a 3 tone water-to-air unit for cooling the house. For safety and capacity reasons (some I don’t fully understand yet) all of the units have their own set of wells for the ground water closed loop feeds. The simple math has one well for each ton of HVAC thus 5+5+3 = 13 wells. Each well has and “in” and an “out”. That makes 26 pipes. All 26 pipes need to run into the utility room.

The HVAC contractor dug the “tunnel” and ran the lines and then buried it all back up again. The intermediate phase made for quite an image …

Here today gone tomorrow …

Glen — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 22:30:52 +0000

… hmmm … must be “tomorrow”.

Bathrooms in the rough

Glen — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:30:54 +0000

The concrete slab pours (yes, plural) are about to start. This means the drain lines for the bathrooms - current and future - need to be roughed in. This series of pipes represent the first floor toilet, the shower drain, the outlet for the washing machine, the bathroom sink drain, a stub for a future upstairs bathroom, a trap for a shop side toilet, and a shop utility sink. I know that clustering the plumbing and stacking the bathrooms simplifies things but this got a bit crowded !

Zen Sleeping

Glen — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:30:54 +0000

For the past week and likely for the next few, my days starts very early and before the sun. This morning, I went back into the bedroom to roust the sleepy head and found she had made throughly good use of the warm bed after I exited an hour earlier …