Thursday, September 06, 2007

Evening Trail


Evening Trail
Originally uploaded by SdosRemedios.
This is the shot I finally ended up with, after moving from the rocks at Whaler's Cove. This is a five frame high dynamic range image at Pt. Lobos.

Lobos Sunset

Lobos Sunset
I like to plan my shots ahead of time so I scouted this location in the afternoon thinking I could capture a nice sunset among the rocks. What I didn't take into account is the orientation of Pt. Lobos which has too northerly a view at this location. So I took this shot since I was already setup, and I like the unplanned effect of the sun behind the rocks and the color tones of the reflected sky in the water.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Grand Army Plaza


Grand Army Plaza
Originally uploaded by SdosRemedios.
While visiting Brooklyn I took time out to shoot this fabulous monument at the top of Prospect Park. It's a miniature version of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, the man who invented landscape architecture, it originally had no statuary on it when it was dedicated in 1892. During the period 1898-1901 the Quadriga, The Spirit of the Army, and The Spirit of the Navy bronzes were added.

This is a hyperbolic projection of a spherical panorama.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Stitching Your Panorama

There are many good panorama stitching programs to choose from; I like PTGui with Panotools because it give me maximum control over the final output. The basic process is:
  1. Load your images into your stitching program with the first image containing the "normalized" orientation for the panorama. By normalized I mean straight and level, since all other images will be oriented with respect to this one. I usually include my nadir shot for control point calculations, but omit it before the final stitch.
  2. Generate your control points and/or manually add your own pairs.
  3. Examine the control point table and remove errant points until the overall error is less than two pixels. Redefine control point pairs if necessary.
  4. Stitch to an equirectangular .tif file
  5. Rotate the nadir by applying -90° pitch and stitch with these settings to a nadir file.
  6. Use an image editing program to fill-in the nadir circle. Sometimes I use a handheld nadir shot and stitch it during step 5. Save the nadir file.
  7. Load the nadir file into PTGui and reverse the pitch, returning the panorama to its original orientation. Save the file to a temporary file.
  8. Using your image editing software, combine the original stitch without nadir data with the temporary file your just saved. Blend the nadir into the original and save the result as a complete spherical equirectangular image.
  9. Use Pano2QTVR or other similar programs to create Quicktime VR movies.