Panorama of Marienplatz, München, Germany
Submitted by brad on Mon, 2008-05-12 13:17Here's my latest assembled panorama, of the main square of Munich, known as Marienplatz, taken from the St. Peter's Church bell tower just to the south.
Here's my latest assembled panorama, of the main square of Munich, known as Marienplatz, taken from the St. Peter's Church bell tower just to the south.
As I've noted, with digital cameras we all take tons of photos, and the next task is to isolate out the winners. I've outlined better workflow for this and there are still more improvements we need in photo management software, but one task both cameras and photo management software could make easier is eliminating the plain bad shots.
Digital Picture Frames are finally coming down to tolerable prices and decent resolutions. We are about to give my mother one that's 1024x768 and 15" on the diagonal. In part that's because I never got around to building one out of a laptop though I still think a linux distro that turned an old laptop into a digital PF would be a great idea because the ability to do wireless networking to subscribe to flickr and other feeds is the waiting killer app for these frames.
I have generated several of my panoramas for this year's Burning Man.
This year featured a double rainbow, and of course much of the week with no man on his pedestal.
Update: I now have a whole Burning Man area on the blog!
I've not been blogging of late because I'm at Burning Man, and while normally I don't report breaking news in this blog, we just witnessed a strange event. Through accident or arson, the Man was set alight this evening shortly after totality began in the eclipse of the moon.
Well, this site is at a crawl now because the panorama I assembled of San Francisco in 1971 is on the digg.com front page. If you haven't seen it before it's on the San Francisco page, the panorama of SF from the top of the Bay Bridge in 1971.
I've been remiss in updating my panoramas, so I just did some work on the site and put up a new page full of Alberta panoramas, as well as some others I will point to shortly.
Hey photo editing programs -- I'm looking at you, Photoshop -- a lot of you allow people to place text into graphic images, usually as a text layer. Most graphics with text on the web are made this way. Then we export the image as a jpeg or png/gif, flatting the layers so our artful text is displayed. This is how all the buttons with words are made, as well as the title banner graphics on most web sites.
So many people today are using tags to organize photos and to upload them to sites like flickr for people to search. Most types of tagging are easiest to do on a computer, but certain types of tagging would make sense to add to photos right in the camera, as the photos are taken.
I'm pleased to see that more of my photography is getting licenced for ads and web sites these days. I like the job that this PDA ad does with my 360 degree view of Shanghai People's Square. Of course I can't read the text very well.
My Canon cameras have a variety of ways you can change their settings to certain specialty ones. You can set a manual white balance. You can set an exposure compensation for regular exposures or flash (to make it dimmer or brighter than the camera calculates it should be.) You can change various shooting parameters (saturation etc.) and how the images will be stored (raw or not, large/medium/small etc.) You can of course switch (this time with a physical dial) from manual exposure to various automatic and semi-automatic exposure modes.
While it will be a while before I get the time to build all my panoramas of this year's Burning Man, I did do some quick versions of some of those I shot of the burn itself. This year, I arranged to be on a cherry picker above the burn. I wish I had spent more time actually looking at the spectacle, but I wanted to capture panoramas of Burning Man's climactic moment. The entire city gathers, along with all the art cars for one shared experience. A large chunk of the experience is the mood and the sound which I can't capture in a photo, but I can try to capture the scope.
Yesterday I received a Dell 3007WFP panel display. The price hurt ($1600 on eBay, $2200 from Dell but sometimes there are coupons) and you need a new video card (and to top it off, 90% of the capable video cards are PCI-e and may mean a new motherboard) but there is quite a jump by moving to this 2560 x 1600 (4.1 megapixel) display if you are a digital photographer. This is a very similar panel to Apple's Cinema, but a fair bit cheaper.
Hot on the heels of the regular photos the gallery of 2005 Burning Man Panoramas is now up. This year, I got to borrow a cherry picker at sunset on Friday for some interesting perspectives. The long ones are around 3400 by 52000 at full res (180 megapixels) and even the ones on the web are larger than before. Use F11 to put your browser into full screen mode.
I've gotten way behind on putting up my photographs, and I realized I had never put my Burning Man 2005 shots up. We're already planning for 2006.
So I got them up this weekend. Of particular interest to burners this year will be the aerial survey I did of the city, over 200 close-up photos of just about every camp in the city from the sky.
And yes, I shot plenty of panoramas, and I have built most of them, but still don't have the panorama page up.
I'll be moving soon to the Canon 5D camera from my 20D. It's better in just about every way, but like many "pro" cameras it does not have a built in flash.
It's not that there isn't a reason for this. Built in flashes usually suck, and nobody would use them for any sort of serious photography, except for fill. So if you're going out on a shoot, you would of course carry along some quality flashes and the built-in would be a waste of space.
A really geeky idea: A fedora (common hat of the classic press photographer's uniform) or other hat with a built in remote controlled flash unit in it.
In the summer we did a road trip in the northwest, up to Calgary, through Banff in the summer and then to Oregon Country Fair. The photojournal is not yet ready, but I have prepared some of the panos. First, here is the Montana section, which means the Going to the Sun road through Glacier National Park. Truly one of the world's great roads, I'm afraid the panos don't do it justice.
I have been quite behind in processing my photo galleries and panoramics.
I have just now put up the gallery of panoramics from the Death Valley Wildflowers trip from March of 2005. Interesting scenery, and when you get close enough lots of fields of flowers. Of course, on most of them the flowers are so tiny that they are resolved well only when the panos are seen printed at full resolution, not when shrunk for a computer screen.
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