Saturday, March 18, 2006


Urbana, Illinois. 2005. Click to enlarge (5.5 Mb)

For the few remaining junta in champaign: The moving black coat in the right corner is S, talking with her husband, A. She came back abusing that red truck driver, who she claims tried to kill her! :D

21 Comments:

Blogger atma_tripta said...

Wonderful pic. I am curious about the slight change in the shade (blush to white) from left to right of the pic. Is it just a natural lighting effect or some kind of relic due to fusing of multiple images?
Don't curse me if its silly! I really dont know anything about photography...:)
@

8:33 PM  
Blogger littlecow said...

@atma_tripta: yeah... its not the natural light - that effect is artificial. its actually a software bug in olympus camedia (the software which i use to stitch individual images together)... everytime i look at this picture, this gradient comes to the fore and it almost hurts. but i decided to post it anyway for the senti value! :)

some day, it will be fixed!

11:06 PM  
Blogger littlecow said...

@rhythm: You must know best! Who am I to question? :D

10:14 AM  
Blogger Selma Mirza said...

3.5 mb...

but lovely picture. i'm curious, which camera do you use?

4:44 AM  
Blogger Selma Mirza said...

awesome camera.

wowsome picture.

looks like a suspense thriller.

4:54 AM  
Blogger littlecow said...

@evenstar: Its an ordinary olympus C5000 digital camera. The picture is a panoramic composite-thats why its so large. Between the many cameras I have seen so far(excluding SLRs), this is amongst the best in terms of its CCD quality, response etc. If you are considering buying a digicam for less than $400, olympus is very good. But beware of battery issues. I got a new one for my sister and she complains that the battery runs out very fast... (Note: the C5000 has a Ni-Cd rechargeable battery, which is *real* good)

8:40 AM  
Blogger Born a Libran said...

Dude, a couple of questions. What are the conditions that 2 snaps have to be taken in before we can stitch them together? Are there better s/w for doing the above in light of the artificial gradient coming up as a flaw? Have you tried these acad s/w which comes for free from prof's sites - cutting edge tech for free but acad s/w has its probs?

8:56 AM  
Blogger littlecow said...

Disable the auto metering in your camera (so that you set the shutter exposure and aperture at a fixed value). If your camera has any auto gain/auto white correction etc, disable them. Basically, make it all manual including the focus.

Take a series of pictures with enough overlap on either side (10-20%). And you can stich them using the freewares available on the net. I read reviews that ptgui is very good (but the results I got were poor - I suspect my camera parameters were badly chosen) or you could try any of the other softwares which make this process painless and automatic.

Which acad software are you referring to?

5:41 PM  
Blogger ligne said...

nice pic..the person in the black coat is almost invisible..:)

5:22 AM  
Blogger Born a Libran said...

I meant something like this :

Enblend - http://enblend.sourceforge.net/
(Berkeley sw)

He recommends using:
Hugin - http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

or
Panotools - http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~dersch/

along with Enblend.

There is also this s/w which automatically recognized what to stitch together:

Autopano - http://autopano.kolor.com/
and can be used alongwith PTAssembler.

http://www.tawbaware.com/ptasmblr.htm

I think thats enough dude. You have given me motivation to find the info and now I will have to gather motivation to use it.

7:27 AM  
Blogger Born a Libran said...

BTW, I did read in some site that they recommend 30% overlap. You might want to try that. Just keep in touch about its results.

7:29 AM  
Blogger littlecow said...

@b-a-l: Cool! I will check them out. You could try out the stadium, downtown urbana, shemaguer park or even the quad for panos. I tend to think that downtown urbana (with that church shaped like a rook) and the lodge might make a very find photograph, easy to stich together. One expt you could try is to use both autofocus and manual focus modes and see which one turns out to be better.

@ligne: Thanks! She does look aligned with the tree!

9:26 AM  
Blogger littlecow said...

@atma_tripta, b-a-l: Thanks to your kindness in prodding my usually dormant obsessive-compulsive-disorder into action, I got the pano fixed using ptassembler in the auto create mode (it probably used Enblend while creating this image) and it worked out just fine. The minor curvature effect you see on the fence is due to poor parameter choices (I suspect due to leaving the focus multiplier at the default setting). The image does look pretty fine now but ultimately, I kind of liked that reddish hue in the old image!

*I am now half a day late for my office, dammit!*

10:31 AM  
Blogger Born a Libran said...

It does look pretty good... I have seen this pic of a mountain made by joining 36 photos!! That is the largest I have heard of in terms of pano effects.... Will take the pano snap and get back to u...

7:51 PM  
Blogger littlecow said...

And there was another pano of the grand canyon (2-d pano) which was also very large!

3:56 AM  
Blogger atma_tripta said...

bala,
What is a half day delay when you are creating masterpieces? think what would have happened if da vinci thought Iam getting delayed for lunch while paiting monalisa :D
@

10:46 AM  
Blogger Selma Mirza said...

I'm undecided between an Olympus E300, a Nikon D50 and a Powershot G6. All seem to be excellent.. i am looking at older models because they are cheaper. which one do you suggest?

12:11 PM  
Blogger littlecow said...

@atma_tripta: your kindness in the comparison almost hurts. ;p

but i am sure he must have been well-fed before his painting sessions!

@evenstar: check out dpreview.com, if you have not already done so. my only suggestion that might be worth is this: its a one-time investment. so you might as well get a camera that performs exceptionally well rather than save a few hundred bucks and wonder about what could have been! bornalibran got a new SLR a few months back (Nikon D70 i think... so he might be able to give you some inputs). Good luck! and let us know what you go for in the end...

8:02 PM  
Blogger Selma Mirza said...

time to activate word verification, BK?

3:45 AM  
Blogger educatedunemployed said...

Thats a beautiful picture.

6:01 PM  
Blogger littlecow said...

@evenstar: done!

@educatedunemployed: thanks! right after a snow, the midwest always seemed very peaceful and quiet. i loved watching the snow fall in champaign - it always gave a soothing feeling.

6:16 PM  

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