In November I spent three weeks in Brazil, the country where I grew up two decades ago. Surprisingly little had changed since then. Except maybe that this time I had an DSLR:
That’s Rio de Janeiro and the old colonial towns of Ouro Preto, Mariana, São João del Rey, Tiradentes, Congonhas do Campo, Paraty in Minas Gerais and Rio State.
Once again Ouro Preto, and Copacabana Beach at night.
In January/February around FOMS 2008 and linux.conf.au I traveled to Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia,
together with two fellow hackers, Kay and David. It took a while until I found the
time to go through and sort all the photos I made on this trip. But finally I am done, and I am not going
to spare you a few shots.
That’s the beach of the Summerville Resort near Porto de Galinhas, Brazil, where
the best Free Software conference in existence took place in 2008: INDT’s BOSSA Conference. Oh boy, if you don’t believe how good it was, just watch their video.
FOSS.in was one of the best conferences I have ever
been to, and a lot of fun. The organization was flawless and I can
only heartily recommend everyone to send in a presentation proposal for next year’s
iteration. I certainly hope the commitee is going to accept my proposals next year again. Especially the food was gorgeous.
I will spare you the usual conference photos, you can find a lot of those on flickr. However, what I will not spare you are a couple of photos I shot in Bangalore, Srirangapatna and Mysore.
On popular request, here are a few suggestions how to make best use of Hugin for stitching your panoramas. You probably should have read some of the tutorials at Hugin’s web site before reading these suggestions.
Use manual exposure settings in your camera. On Canon cameras this means
you should be using the “M” mode. Make sure choose good exposure times and
aperture so that the entire range you plan to take photos of is well exposed.
If you don’t know how to use the “M” mode of your camera you probably should
be reading an introduction into photography now. The reason for setting
exposure values manually is that you want the same exposing on all photos from
your settings.
Disable automatic white balance mode. You probably should have done that
anyway. “Semi-automatic” white balance mode is probably OK (i.e. selecting
the white balance from one of the pre-defined profiles, such as “Daylight”,
“Cloudy”, …)
Also manually set the ISO level. You probably should be doing that anyway.
Using autofocus is probably OK.
Try not not move around too much while taking the photo series. Hugin doesn’t like that too much. It’s OK to move a little, but you should do all the shots for your panorama from a single point, and not while moving on a circle, line, or even Bezier-line.
When doing 360° panoramas it is almost guaranteed (at least in northern
countries) that you have the sun as back light. That will overexpose the
panorama in that direction and lower the contrast in the area. To work against
this, you might want to choose to do your panorama shots at noon in summer when
sun is in zenith. Gray-scaling the shot and doing some other kind of
post-processing might be a way to ease this problem.
To work against chromatic aberration it is a good idea to use large overlap areas, and doing your shots in “landscape” rather then “portrait” (so that only the center of each image is used in the final image)
Running hugin/enblend on an encrypted $HOME (like I do) won’t make you particularly happy.
Pass -m 256 to enblend. At least on my machine (with limited RAM and dm-crypt) things are a lot faster that way.
Sometimes moving things (e.g. people) show up twice (or even more times) in the resulting panorama. Sometimes that is funny, sometimes it is not. To remove them, open the seperate tif files before feeding them into enblend into Gimp and cut away the things you want to remove from all but one of these images. Then pass that on to enblend.
If regardless how many control points you set in Hugin the images just don’t fit together, you should probably run “Optimize Everything” instead of just “Optimize Positions”.
When doing your shots, make sure to hold the camera all the time at the same height, to avoid having to cut too much of the image away in the final post-processing. This is sometimes quite difficult, especially if you have images with no clear horizon.
Remember that you can set horizontal and vertical lines as control points in Hugin!
Good for straitening things out and making sure that vertical things are
actually vertical in the resulting panorama.
Following an invitation of the Nokia 770/N800 multimedia team I’ve been
visiting the Nokia research center in Helsinki last week. A good opportunity to get some more material for Hugin:
Finally I found the time to sort my photos from Australia, when I vistited the country after linux.conf.au, in January this year. Some photos are quite good, many are not. However one panoramic view of the Three Sisters in the Blue Mountains NP is particularly beautiful:
Just perfect as a desktop background on your Xinerama setup!
The collective thoughts of the interwebz
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