Christopher Glick's blog

I spent the past couple of days in the Kansai area and two days shooting panoramas for fun in one part of Kyoto. It wasn't until the second panorama that I realized I had left the ISO at 800, which has resulted in much noise in the apex shot.

When around firearms, I am always careful to check everything beforehand. Perhaps I just need a camera that shoots in the firearm sense so I will be more careful in future.

I've got an old Loreo 3D lens and just finished playing with it to create an object movie of a small paper kit frog I completed last year. I put the frog on a cheap ¥100 turntable and shot it with the Loreo lens. I was too close so I reshot everything to make the frog clearer. Loreo has a macro 3D lens, but I don't. Anyway, the 3D object movie is kind of neat. I put it together in The VR Worx 2.6.2.

It is visible here. If you don't have a Loreo viewer, you'll just see two rotating frogs:

I'm an amateur and likely always will be.

For shooting, I use a Canon 350D, Peleng lens, and NodalNinja 3. I shoot in RAW then make exposure and white balance adjustments in Canon's Digital Photographer Pro. I export as 16-bit TIFFs. Frequently I forget, but occasionally I run the TIFFs through Kekus' LensFixCI to remedy chromatic aberration before feeding them into a stitcher.

I just wanted to mention that I have been putting up various full-screen panoramas I have taken at my current personal website, which will be valid for about 5 years (paid in advance): http://chrisglick.us

This evening I took some time to work with LensFix CI. I entered my figures from calibrating my Peleng lens then played with the sliders to correct chromatic aberration. Rather fun.

If I understand things correctly, it's best to do these corrections--CA and lens distortion (but not defish)--in LensFix CI then use the exported images for stitching. I'll find out over the next week or so.

Disclaimer: I'm a hobbyist with only the most rudimentary graphic editing skills.

Over much of the past year, I made QTVR panoramas with PTMac. My 6 horiztonal shots stitched wonderfully, but adding the zenith often caused errors with seams, in the triangle formed by the zenith shot and the first and last horizontal shots. Usually the error would be a small section off by 1-3 pixels. I'm working on acquiring the graphic editing skills to take care of such errors.

I began using Nisus Writer 6.5 perhaps with Mac OS 8. An English teacher, I am constantly writing activities, articles, and handouts, for which I rely on Nisus Writer Pro. Though a software house, Nisus also sells a CD, Kyoto Gardens. Here's the product blurb:

Kyoto Gardens: A Virtual Stroll Through Zen Landscapes utilizes Apple Computer's QuickTime VR technology to "walk through" 24 of Kyoto's most renowned gardens.

I've recently learned to do two simple things in LiveStage Pro 4.6.6: add an image (e.g., "Chris Glick © 2008") to the QTVR window and make images appear at a fixed location in the QTVR window when a hotspot is clicked or when tripped with Mouse Down/Up. The latter task took a frustrating number of hours spread across two days with ample interruptons, but learning how to do it was quite rewarding.

I am a hobbyist panographer with little to no experience with graphic editing software. To date I have been using batch processing my RAW images as 16-bit TIFF files. PTMac gives me good results, but I have a small dilemma: I don't yet have a 16-bit graphic editor (neither GraphicConverter nor GIMP can handle the task, yet).

Over the next couple of weeks, I will try remake some of my 16-bit panoramas as 8-bit to see how the results differ.

Since calibrating my Peleng lens, I've been pleased at how satisfying my panoramas have become despite minimal skills in graphic editing. With PTMac, six horizontal shots and one zenith shot usually allow me to create something satisfying with only a few stitching flaws, often just a small section near the zenith or nadir that is ajar by a pixel or two. Perhaps use of a Clone tool can fix such errors, but I'm spending more time shooting and stitching instead.