Strange Shadows

I really like this image.  It is a panorama taken at Spring Mill State Park (about 9 images, total is about 200+ degrees) last summer.  While it looks like the shadows in the foreground are parallel, if you look closely you will see that the one in the center (from the column) is actually perpendicular to the two on either side (which are from the overhead viaduct).  Confusing isn't it!  It helps to remember that the viaduct is certainly not curved as shown in the panorama!

As always, you can click on the image to enlarge it.

Tower of Power

As spherical panoramas go this one is really bad.  I was at a park without  even a tripod and decided that trying to shoot a "little planet" spherical panorama would be interesting from inside the HV electrical tower.  As you can see the stitching is terrible (and I spent way too much time in Photoshop even getting this far) but I really like the view.

As you can see the towers go off in the distance forward (at the bottom, across the lake) and behind (top of image) me.  The next time I see one of these that I can easily get to I am going to take my panorama head!

Welcome to my universe

The more I play with Photo Shop the more I like it!  I transformed my back yard into a lunar landscape and threw in the earth and a sun.  Certainly weird, but I kind of like it.  Thank you NASA for a few heavenly bodies.  The "real" part of the picture is a spherical panorama my back yard taken on a snowy day.

Park Ridge East Park Polar Panorama

The "polar panorama" below was generated from the 360 panorama below it using the "polar coordinates" Photo Shop distortion filter.  You can see the slide and fort that was in my blog from two days ago at the top of the image.  I did use the patch tool to remove the small part of the tripod that was sneaking in and to patch the snow at the very bottom (or center?) of the image.

Here is the 360 panorama before I converted it. Hugin did a really nice job, with only a few minor stitching problems.  I was using the panorama head I made from an old theodolite and taking a photo every 25deg. for each of the four rows.  This image is reduced for Blogspot, but the original (stitched from four rows of 15 photos) is 15500 x 8400 pixels.

My Spherical Office.....

I admit it, I love 360 panoramas and spherical panoramas.  I am still trying to get my calibrations done right, but I get closer each time (I think).  The top image is a series of 36 photos (Nikon D80) taken as three rows of 12 images.  The camera is rotated 30 degrees between each shot on the first rotation, and then tilted 30 degrees up and down for the remaining two series of 12 shots.  I strongly recommend that you download FSPViewer, written by Fulvio Senore.  The program is free, doesn't change anything on your computer (Windows only--sorry), and allows you to literally "explore" panoramas like the above.

I couldn't resist converting the 360 panorama to a spherical panorama--enjoy!

Speaking of Spherical Panoramas....

This is one of the techniques I learned this past summer.  It is actually rather easy to do if you have a 360 degree panorama and PhotoShop (this is generated by a spherical coordinate distortion filter).  The photos were taken from the middle of the softball diamond in the Park Ridge East neighborhood park.  The park image was done just using a tripod and an earlier version of my panorama mount. 



Below is the same distortion filter applied to the living room photo in my last entry.

I did have to use PhotoShop to put the center of the table in since that is where the panorama head was sitting.

Spherical Panoramas

Another fall/winter project has been the construction of a panorama head that is accurate enough to allow Hugin (and other) panorama stitching programs to work.  After several “jury-rigged” creations I have finally come up with a system that has promise.  It is based on the base of an old theodolite that I picked up cheap because it had a destroyed telescope.  The small image showes the current model with my Nikon D80. 

It has been too cold to try it outside so I have as my first attempt a photo of our living room at Christmas.  This is a spherical panorama made up of 48 photos (three rows of 16 photos).  While there are some obvious seams, it actually turned out kind of neat!

If you want to see the real power of spherical panoramas, check out the program FSPViewer.  It works with both spherical and 360 degree panoramas.