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Yes, you’ve seen this location before on this web site. But not 30,000 pixels wide. The HDView plugin makes this previously unimaginable feat entirely possible. Be sure you have the HDView plugin installed, (Sorry, no Mac version yet) then check it out!
It turns out it’s easy to embed a GigaPan Panorama on a web page. Hopefully, this will get more of you to check it out. Be sure to drag the the zoom slider on the left. Or, double-click on a region to zoom in on it. Looks like I have a white-balance problem in this panorama, but the amount of detail in is fairly awesome! Of course, you can always view a full-screen version as well.
This is really my first attempt with a decent camera attached to the GigaPan, so my results can only get better. Hope you’ll come back often for more!
Of course, after looking at the results xRes folks are getting I’m considering other options altogether…
It would be very cool if all of you got your very own Gravatar. Then, when you leave a comment on thedude.com or any other site that supports Gravatars, we’ll all get to see your smiling face! Or your cat’s face or your bird’s butt or anything else that says something about who you are. Here’s mine. Get yours!
The shots taken by the professional photographer were finally posted today. I hate to say it, but I’m not sure that he made the most of the terrific photo-op. In addition to some tighter shots, I would certainly have made at least a couple panoramic shots of the event and stitched them together. This would have allowed him to get higher resolution and better coverage of this unique event. The good news though, is that he got lots of shots of thedude gettin’ goofy in his little car! :)
The other thing that would have made these shots even better is if Kelly had been there, but she wasn’t feeling well this morning. :(
thedude and Steve out on a shoot on a clear day in October, 1983. I don’t remember where we got the 4 x 5 camera, but I know Steve got some great results with it. Got more scans, Steve?
When I shot this, I accidentally had the lens open to f1.4. The resulting haziness and shallow depth of focus looks pretty cool. I’m going to have to use this effect again!
I was lucky enough to have an amazing seat at today’s Giant’s game. I was in row one directly behind the batter at AT & T park. I think I was closer to the batter than the pitcher was! If you look closely in the very center of the shot, you’ll see a Plexiglas window. My seat was just to the left of it – next to the guy in the blue ball cap facing the camera. :)
Being that close meant that I was too close to the field to shoot a decent panorama. So, to get the shot above, I moved about half way back in the stands. And yes, the Giant’s beat the Marlins, 4-3.
My apologies to those of you who have seen pictures shot from the roof before, but this one is different.
What makes this first pano interesting is that I broke all the rules when I made it. I used a very modest camera, and shot in fully-automatic mode. I set the Gigapan rig on a ledge on the roof. The rig was not perfectly level, and had a tendency to wobble. Basically, I setup and shot the pano as quickly as possible to see what kind of results I’d get without trying too hard. Given that the rig used to produce this level of detail costs less than a single mid-range lens for my Nikon D3, I think you’ll agree that the results are pretty darn amazing.
Over the next few days, I hope to shoot more with the Gigapan head and a Canon G7. I’ll compare the results to those from my D3.
I got up extra early today to take part in a record-breaking photo. I had the chance to appear with a large group of Smart Cars two-abreast winding all the way down the “crookedest street in America“. I was not going to miss this!
The event turned out to be better than I had hoped – in spite of the typical San Francisco summer weather. What made it really special for me is that without making any effort to do so, I found myself in the absolute prime location for the photo. Me and my little car are not only in the first row, but we are in the position closest to the official event photographer. I can’t wait to see (and share!) the results.
But then, any event that includes 133 Smart Cars produces plenty of fun photo opportunities.
I love panoramic photography. Now, I can’t afford one of these very expensive panoramic cameras, so I’ve been creating “poor man’s pano’s” for years by stitching images together – sometimes manually and sometimes with the aid of software. Well, achieving perfect results is becoming a lot easier these days, thanks to a couple of break-through products. The first is AutoPano Pro. This marvelous piece of software creates the highest quality panoramas I’ve ever made. Incredibly, it’s also the easiest to use!
The image above was shot at last night’s Oakland A’s game. I used my D3 with my humble manual-focus 50mm Nikkor f1.4 lens. I manually exposed the images, and did my best to rotate the hand held camera and lens more-or-less around the nodal point while I shot 18 images – 6 columns, 3 rows. The alignment and overlap between the resulting images was far from perfect. Nevertheless I think the results speak for themselves. Even I can’t tell where the images are stitched together! To better appreciate the quality of the results, I strongly suggest you download a higher resolution version of the shot. (5 megabytes) When you examine this image for sharpness, bear in mind that what you’re looking at is one-quarter of the resolution of the full image, which is almost 19,000 pixels wide.
Another amazing product, mentioned here recently, is the GigaPan robotic camera mount. Yesterday, I learned that my begging has paid off – I have been selected to participate in the beta program, (yay!) and should be receiving my very own GigaPan head in a few days. What I’m very interested in learning is whether an 18-30 image pano shot with my D3 will look better in some way than a 100 or even 220 image panorama produced with the GigaPan head and Canon G7.
Oh – and The A’s beat the Chicago White Sox, 6 to 4.
Inspired by my friend Jason, I decided to purchase a GPS tracker. I plan to use this device to keep track of our trip to Burma and then to geotag the images I produce while there. This will make it easy to upload images to Google Earth and have them appear in the exact location they were taken. To see what a GPS Data Logger does, click on the image to the left and have a look at our morning commute in Google Maps.
I looked briefly at other more expensive options, but decided on the Amod GPS Data Logger because it’s much cheaper than the on-camera device I tried out, and more importantly, it does not rely on camera power to operate.
The device ships with easy-to-use software which allows you to geotag images in a batch after they have been shot. For best results, you’ll need to ensure that the clock on your digital camera is set properly. (If it’s not, the software has an offset tool that can correct for time shift.) With a couple mouse-clicks, the software adds geospatial data to the EXIF info in a whole directory full of images. Pretty slick. More on this cool technology soon.
