Archive for June, 2009

I was invited to speak to the Dallas Camera Club last night. I was really amazed to see almost 60 people attending the meeting. The DCC has been around for 75 years and has a very active calendar of meetings, competitions and field trips.They are a great group.

I spent about an hour talking about panoramic images, discussing why you’d want to shoot them, how to make them and then looking at the amazing software available to automatically stitch several images together into a seamless photo. I’ve been using AutoPano Pro for a few years and just love it. There are dozens of programs out there, many of them free or inexpensive. Panorama Tools has been around for a long time and has some great front ends like PT GUI. If you have Photoshop CS4, you already own a great stitching program, but I still far prefer AutoPano for its flexibility and ability to detect and extract panos from a folder of images.

I think panoramas are one of the coolest and most satisfying techniques to come out of digital photography. The images are wide format, more closely matching our natural field of view. You can create big impressive prints with even a low resolution pocket camera since the resolution of each photo is added together into the stitched final image. They look beautiful hanging on a wall and are easy to print at home. Watching the software assemble the images is really amazing.

At the meeting I showed some panoramic sequences from recent travels. I also did a live demo, shooting hand held with a little Pentax pocket camera and dragging the images into the AutoPano software.

These are the raw shots:

This is the result of the panorama stitch, processed using the “Spherical Projection” setting. This has the best relationship of sizes of the people in the room, but the most pronounced curvature of tables, which were actually in straight, parallel rows. This is what the shot would look like if taken with a scanning film camera like the Widelux or Horizon:

The same panorama, using the “Planar Projection” setting. The tables look better, but the people at the edges are stretched, as they would be using a traditional super wide angle lens:

This is the same Planar projection as above, but taken into Photoshop for some warping. I did a Select All, used Transform:Warp, and pulled in the sides. There is less of a stretched feel, but you start to loose the wide format of the panorama:

I highly recommend shooting some panoramas. With AutoPano, and others, you can shoot multi-row panos, and even shoot any group of images covering a subject, without them having to be aligned, level – or even all horizontal or all vertical, as long as there is overlap in the images the software will find the pano in there.

Well, here’s a product I didn’t know existed but was happy to find. About a year ago I built a new machine for the studio, mostly to run Lightroom. I like Lightroom and want to love it, but have had speed problems with it since day one. So I built a quad core machine with 8gb ram, fast ATI card (had conflicts with the Nvidia) and a serious RAID 6 controller from Areca for storage and cache. For my viewing pleasure I got two 27″ displays from Doublesight and glued it all together with Vista 64. The problems began when I had to install a couple of DVI video extension cables to the monitors. Every time the screen blanker kicked in, or when the machine was restarted or came out of sleep mode, the monitors wouldn’t come up at the right resolution or even left to right sequence. About half the time I had to go in and reset the layout and resolution. It was one of those really frustrating things that I let go for two long.

While I was trying to get some HDMI problems solved (another day, another rant!) I asked John Johns, the video wizard at In-Sync, Inc. in Dallas, what he would recommend. He referred me to Gefen, a company that makes a crazy array of video conversion boxes. On their website I found a little box called the DVI Detective and an explanation of what the problem was with my monitors (and my HDMI troubles). Both of those connections transmit an EDID code. According to Wikipedia: “Extended display identification data (EDID) is a data structure provided by a computer display to describe its capabilities to a graphics card. It is what enables a modern personal computer to know what kind of monitor is connected.” As with many things electronic, that doesn’t always work out in practice. What was happening was the EDID wasn’t being picked up and weird things were happening.

The DVI Detective goes inline between the computer and the monitor. You power it up with the included wallwart, push a tiny button on the little box, a light flashes telling you the code is being received and stored, you flip a switch to lock the setting – and you’re done. The power can now be unplugged. I was hesitant to spend 2 x $60 (from Buy.com) on these little gizmos but my problem is completely solved. I love these things.

They are tiny boxes and come with nice, stout turn around DVI patch cables. A solid product that does exactly what it claims to with very little setup. This is what the mess looks like behind my monitors until I dress this up a little:

UPDATE: 7-4-09
I’ve been using the Gefen DVI Detective boxes for a few weeks now and I can happily report that they have completely solved the problems I was having! Money well spent.

I have a collection of toy and cheap cameras that I started about 30 years ago. My rule for the first couple of years was that I would’t spend more than a dollar. Sometimes I would find 5 or 6 at a thrift store. Then my family started looking for them. I still get a bag of garage sale cameras every Christmas from my brother.  I now have probably 500-600 cameras stashed in cardboard boxes on some industrial shelves at the studio.

For a while there has been a tiny leak in one of the concrete studio walls and I was dutifully collecting the water in a bucket. When I went to the studio yesterday during a downpour I discovered water dripping from a new place, right under the shelf that holds my collection. Turns out a trickle of water had been going into one of the boxes for the last few months. Unwrapping the cameras was gross and sad. I had to throw away about a half dozen, including a nice small wood view camera that had fallen apart. The biggest shock was this Argus C3, which was in its original box. The box was a black, sodden, smelly mess. I’m guessing that the combination of water, darkness and the leather case made a perfect breeding ground for mold and mildew.

A few more photos: