thedude.com

It’s not that I’m getting tired of looking at these beautiful images - no one loves them more than I do. It’s just that I’ve run out of disk space, so tonight I’m adding a 1.5 terabyte disk to my Linux server. It’ll take a few hours to migrate the data off the old 500 gig drive, so tonight all you get is this crummy panorama that didn’t turn out well enough for me to post under ordinary circumstances. But don’t despair, I’ll make up for it soon.

In the mean time, if you just have to see more images, check out my Picasa photo album. It contains some images that didn’t quite make the cut on thedude.com, and it’s Cooliris enabled. (Cooliris is a MUST-HAVE plugin.) Also, if you are using the Google Screensaver, you can subscribe to my Burma album’s RSS feed here. If you do, you will automatically see my images on your screen as I update them. How cool is that?!

The official launch date is Monday, but lucky readers of thedude.com can take a look at the new site deign now. It’s a huge improvement over the old site, both aesthetically and performance-wise. I’m very proud to have been a part of this effort. Yay!

iTunes is one of the main reasons I have not switched to a Mac. I really do not like it. All I want is a simple music player, and iTunes definitely does not fit into that category. And iTunes has some of the worst UI design flaws ever. (Don’t even get me started.)

Well, the whiz-kids at Apple have finally forced me to soften my position on iTunes with the addition of their latest killer feature - Genius. This gem categorizes all of the music in your iTunes library, allowing you to create a custom playlist with a couple mouse clicks. Simply chose a tune to seed the playlist, and Genius does the rest - instantly creating a playlist of similar music. These lists can be saved, so that means that they can be fine-tuned and combined with other playlists. I’ve been using Genius for days now, and really like the way it works. It finds tunes in my collection I might not ever have listened to and creates playlists that rival my best efforts. VERY cool!

This is probably a good time to mention Pandora - another nice piece of software that does something similar, but from a vast on-line music collection. If you don’t have or don’t want iTunes, I recommend you check out Pandora.

This is always such a difficult event to shoot. The F-18’s are moving at speeds up to 650 miles per hour, and perform their most breathtaking maneuvers more than a mile away. I have to use my longest lens with the camera set to ISO 1000 so that I can use a shutter speed of 1/2500 of a second. Lots of compromises.

I took more than 500 shots. Even so, I think I achieved better results last year. Oh well, I guess I need to keep practicing. More shots here.

Like many of you, I have been putting off upgrading to Vista for years due to its less-than-stellar reputation. Well, my ancient Windows XP install was seriously busted, so I finally took the plunge, and guess what. I love it.

I was able to get everything I absolutely need up and running in about three hours. My essential tools - Chrome, Firefox, PhotoShop, Irfanview, Winamp, FreeHand, AutoPano Pro and WinSCP - all worked perfectly. I had to use “Compatibility Mode” to get the software for my Nikon Scanner and Flix to work, but that’s a minor issue I can live with.

I had only one hardware compatibility issue. My antiquated Creative Extigy USB sound device was not recognized. So, I bought a Creative X-FI 5.0 USB audio device for 59 bucks, and it works and sounds better than the old device.

Of course, I turned off almost all of Aero’s incredibly annoying features and disabled UAC. Now, my humble machine runs great! Certainly faster than the badly broken XP installation I had been using. It was well worth 119 bucks to make my machine usable again.

We’ve been spending a lot of time with our neighbors Jack Tres and Olive lately. That’s a good thing. I shot this picture at Flora on Thursday night. The light was provided by a single candle on the table in front of Tres. I used my old manual-focus f1.4 Nikkor wide open, at 1/15th of a second with the Magic Camera set to ISO 3200. This image is to me, nothing short of amazing. It’s as if the camera added light to the scene. I could not see her this well with my naked eye!

Then, I added the neat little border and drop-shadow to the above thumbnail without ever opening any image editor. Instead of PhotoShop, I used ImageMagick on my Linux server to create the effect at the command line! The command I used to do this:

convert image.jpg -resize 605x \
-unsharp 0.5x1.2+0.5+0.1 -matte \
-bordercolor white -border 8 \
-bordercolor grey85 -border 1 \
\( +clone -background grey60 -shadow 80x3+6+6 \) +swap \
-background white -mosaic image-thumb.jpg

Why would I do this? A few reasons.

1. It’s very fast - it takes just 2 seconds to create this nice effect.
2. I can create this effect form anywhere without any special tools.
3. The effect can be applied very quickly to a whole directory of images.
4. I can add a “create pretty thumbnail” option to Wordpress.

I have a lot to learn before I have item 4 working, but the challenge is half the fun of it!

When I first used this plugin over at xRez, I was completely blown away. HDView is a must-have plugin! Get it now!

Then, click on this link to get a taste of what’s to come. Amazing!!! So much to be excited about!

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…

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 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.

Last night I met with Andrew and his friend Jeff Johnson, the goal being to shoot and perfect the process of creating Gigapan Images with the awesome Gigapan robotic camera head. Luckily Jeff knows everything about this device, and no doubt saved me a lot of time on the learning curve. Our first Gigapan image is a bit shaky (we kept bumping the table during the 15 minute process), but the results hint at what can be created with this combination of a consumer-grade digital camera (Canon G9) and the Gigapan head. Wow!

Having had a chance to learn a bit about this amazing process has me very excited about our trip to Burma. My next goal is to produce the highest resolution images of Burma ever shot.