Photographs, Photographers and Photography

August 31, 2006

Enhanced QTVR interactive features

Filed under: QTVR — Thomas Pindelski @ 6:37 am

CubicConnector does the trick.

That rather intimidating title is nothing more than the addition of ‘click here’ functionality to a QTVR movie/panorama.

This is best illustrated by the enhanced version of the 360 degree panorama of my home theater which has graced these pages before.

Once the QuickTime image loads – click below – cursor over any of the pictures on the walls and the cursor will change to a finger pointing to a globe. Click and you will be take to a high quality image of the picture. Click the ‘back’ button on your browser to return to the panorama.

Click here

This is done using CubicConnector which allows ‘hotspots’ to be defined in a panorama. Each hotspot can then be connected to an image – not good as the file size swells and the image is distorted – or to the URL of an image on your web site. I used the latter approach as it maintains the relatively small size of the QTVR movie and gives you complete control over the size and quality of the image displayed in response to the mouse click. The CubicConnector software is so well designed that the process is intuitive and the whole thing – including learning time – took me one hour to do, which involved creation of fifteen hotspots, one for each hanging picture.

Click on the arrow at the lower left of the QuickTime screen and you can toggle hotspots on or off so that you can see where they are:

You can still zoom in or out in the QuickTime panorama using the Shift and Control keys on your keyboard. The panorama was made using HDR techniques; the photographs on the walls are all straight prints as I had no idea what HDR was when I took them!

In addition to a hotspot for every picture on the walls, try clicking on the snuggle ball to the lower right of the projection screen. The owner was away when this was taken. And, yes, the box he is sitting on contained none other than the Canon 5D used to take the pictures for the panorama, but not one of those on the walls.

August 29, 2006

Joseph Sudek

Filed under: Book reviews, Photographers — Thomas Pindelski @ 6:47 am

A master of lyrical monochrome.

There is so much to like in the Aperture book ‘Josef Sudek – Poet of Prague’ that it’s hard to know where to begin. Sudek (1896-1976) spent nearly his whole life in Czechoslovakia. From 1940, inspired by contact prints from large negatives he devoted himself to this way of working, using a cumbersome large format camera and tripod.

None of this was made easier by the fact that he had lost his right arm as an army soldier in WWI, yet no allowances need be made in looking at his wonderful pictures. What a life. Surviving the first war only to see his country dismembered by the greedy Germans, Poles and Hungarians while cowardly French and English politicians stood by and watched. Surviving twice more, this time WWII and the Cold War, and finally enjoying the fame that was deservedly his late in life.

The reproductions are superb, none finer than those of his series of St. Vitus Cathedral taken in the late 1920s. The narrative is outstanding, written by people who both knew and worked with him.

My favorite quote of his, on page 44, goes as follows:

“It would have bored me extremely to have restricted myself to one specific direction for my whole life, for example, landscape photography. A photographer should never impose such restrictions upon himself.”

The book can be bought for 50% of its original hardcover price, which was $40, from Powell’s Books and should be in every photographer’s library.

August 28, 2006

Canon 5D sensor dust revisited

Filed under: 5D — Thomas Pindelski @ 7:07 am

Not an unknown issue.

Mention of the dust removal system in the new Canon 400D prompts this column.

I pointed out how easily the guileless are fooled by horribly overpriced sensor cleaning solutions here.

I have since added another very effective tool to my sensor cleaning arsenal, on top of that little $5 brush. It is made by Hakuba, the ‘Lens Pen Pro’, and sells for all of $10, coming with both a retractable brush and less pliable spongy end when the going gets tough. It has far better reach than the film brush. In fairness, I have had few sensor dust problems with the 5D, but then again I live in a part of the USA where prevailing humidity levels are average; I cannot help wondering whether those in dry, static bearing, climates are more affected?

Well, the other day some of my pictures were plagued by a couple of spots on the sensor, requiring retouching in Aperture. Now I really don’t want to do this for a living, so I attacked the sensor – or more correctly the protective cover glass – with the brush end of the Lens Pal Pro, but to no avail. Whatever was there was well and truly stuck:


Dust spots on the sensor – greatly enlarged

So, screwing up my courage – the alternative is sending the camera to Canon at great expense and interminable delay – I had at it carefully with the ‘hard’ spongy end of the Hakuba, with the following result – the spot is almost gone and certainly good enough for me – the image would be 30″ x 40″ if printed:


Dust spots after using the ‘hard’ end of the Hakuba

I prefer this approach to using lens cleaning solution as my experience shows that even with Kodak Lens Cleaner, it’s quite hard to get drying stains off the cleaned surface, and the sensor is not that easily reached.

My first Hakuba Lens Pal Pro no longer wants to click the brush into the open position, so while it remains usable, I have another on order. At $10 it’s hard to complain.

August 26, 2006

QTVR on the big screen

Filed under: QTVR — Thomas Pindelski @ 7:49 am

100″ of forest glory!

I wrote the other day about displaying QTVR pictures on the TV screen.

Today, using the same connecting cables with my iBook I plugged the computer into the ‘Video 1′ input on the AV unit in our home theater and what do you think I got?

Surround sound quality from the MP3 soundtrack – which you can listen to here – was excellent, even if only in two channel stereo. Visual quality was marginal, probably accounted for by the fact that I used a fairly modest quality setting on the Canon 5D when snapping the images. Further, I constrained the quality of the Quicktime movie to keep file size small for speedy loading from my web site. On the other hand, we are talking a 100″ diagonal screen here – now that’s an enlargement!

The screen is 16:9 format (1.78:1) which suits most movies. The QTVR is 2.55:1 which is standard widescreen, and the difference in aspect ratios accounts for the black bars at the top and base of the screen area. I could save the QTVR image in CubicConverter to match this format if desired, thus filling the screen.

For my upcoming one man show at a local winery in April 2007, I hope to get in a couple of big screen TVs as an advertising promotion with a local TV vendor and will thus have QTVRs running throughout the show in addition to the display of framed, static photographs.

August 25, 2006

Costly excess

Filed under: Photography — Thomas Pindelski @ 6:46 am

Canon introduces the 50mm f/1.2 L.

A while back Canon used to sell a 50mm f/1.0 L lens for its DSLRs, quietly discontinuing it rather than face the barrage of derision it generated. Seems that the bottom of an old Coke bottle had superior resolving power and you could buy half of Atlanta’s annual production for less.

Now, just in time for Photokina, Canon announces the slightly slower 50mm f/1.2 L variant.

I confess that it has always left me wondering why anyone makes an f/1.2 standard lens. The quality has historically been poorer than the f/1.4 across the board, the weight and bulk double and the cost far greater. All of this for half a stop in speed?

Step back a moment and think about this. In its DSLR range Canon has the best sensors on the market. Sony may be catching up (they make the sensors for the Nikon DSLRs) but try your full frame Canon DSLR at 1600 ISO and you will know what I am talking about. Now given that you can make more than acceptable originals for 10x enlargements at 1600 ISO, how on earth can half a stop be justified? Shoot in RAW and you can pick up another stop or two at the processing stage with very little quality loss.

So unless you really need to have bragging rights, keep your money and buy a couple of f/1.4 variants. The f/1.2 will retail at $1,600 (!), whereas the f/1.4, a lens with a great reputation, sells for $315. You can drop one of the f/1.4s on the concrete sidewalk and still walk away unhurt…. Now I know that $1,600 is chump change by Leica’s standards whose superb 50mm f/1.0 Noctilux sells for no less than $3,900, but then only collectors and tort lawyers (prrobably the same thing) buy those anyway.

I would far prefer to see Canon adding internal IS to their top of the line bodies (like Sony/Minolta) or at least incorporate IS in the 400mm f/5.6 L lens, which sorely needs it.

August 24, 2006

A Blast from the Past

Filed under: Photographers — Thomas Pindelski @ 6:52 am

Extraordinary recreations by a Russian photographer.

Run, don’t walk, to see the work of Dmitry Popov, a Russian photographer who has meticulously recreated scenes from the first 60 years of the American Century for a car magazine. Each features period automobiles together with actors in period clothing recreating the time and feel of a place (mostly) in America, none better than this one at the Golden Gate in San Francisco. The man reading the San Francsco Examiner, leaning on his magnificent Buick, is doing so on September 3, 1939 – the war that America won for an ungrateful Europe would not start here until some 27 month later, when Japanese tourists visited Hawaii.

Popov writes:

“Every photo shoot is preceded by thorough research of the era. When and under what conditions a particular vehicle model was produced sets the theme. The majority of my photographs are the result of a classically arranged photo shoot. The actors, costumes, hair, makeup, setting, and props are all fashioned to the standards of the era. Although each of the photographic series on each site is presented only partially, the collection taken in its entirety tells a story. The term “Photo-Clipping” would best describe my collection. The series of pictures tells a “moving” story using still images. Most of photographs on this site were taken between 2002 and 2004 for a Russian automotive magazine Autopilot produced by the Kommersant Publishing and Golf Style Next magazine, Moscow, Russia.”

This is story telling in the classsic mould of Life or Picture Post magazines of the era, when photojournalism was king and television in every home was still a distant idea in RCA’s corporate brain.

You don’t have to like cars to enjoy Popov’s fabulous work, though it doesn’t hurt if you do.

Highly recommended.

August 23, 2006

QTVR on the TV screen

Filed under: QTVR — Thomas Pindelski @ 6:57 am

A couple of cables, a smart friend and the iBook do the trick.

My eventual goal for the QTVRs + sound that I am making is to show them on the big screen, meaning the 100″ screen in the home theater on which I project movies.

Well, my iBook, a nice portable source for all of this, is a rather dated G4 model so the first port of call was my trusty nerdy friend, a man of great erudition and wisdom when it comes to things computer. As usual, he did not disappoint.

As advised, I bought an adapter from Apple for some $25 for the video signal – its output end looks like this:

Apple calls it the ‘iBook Video Adapter’ and it connects to the mini-VGA socket on the side of the keyboard. If you want to do this make sure you get the right adapter for your iBook – they vary from model to model.

Those outputs are, respectively, S video and Composite video. As I have a few composite video cables lying around terminated with standard RCA phono plugs, I connected the adapter to the iBook and thence to one of the yellow video inputs on the front of my TV and, hey presto!, the image appeared on the screen, easily controllable with the track pad on the iBook.

For sound, my nerdy friend advised that the only way to do things with this older iBook (meaning it’s completely obsolete, being 3 years old….) was to rout a stereo minijack cable from the low level headphone output using an RCA phono plug-terminated cable to attach the sound feed to the ‘Tape’ input on my receiver. The latter is an ancient Onkyo bought used for very little and produces great sound. Sure enough, the oracle did not let me down, as sounds of birds twittering proceeded to emanate from the speakers. Once inserted the poor quality internal speakers in the iBook were silenced.

It may not look pretty but it works:

I also tried connecting the red and white phono plugs from the iBook to the sound terminals on the TV and there was more than enough signal to drive the TV’s speakers at adequate volume, even if the fidelity was lower than through the speakers attached to the stereo system.

The next step, then, is to try this same setup with the home theater system. This panorama used HDR photography to prevent the bright outdoors from burning out.

August 22, 2006

Surrounded

Filed under: Panoramas, QTVR — Thomas Pindelski @ 7:58 am

Having close detail all around you makes for strong QTVR panoramas.

Click here

Three image HDR pictures, combined in Photomatix, were used here.

August 21, 2006

A predictable disappointment

Filed under: Cameras — Thomas Pindelski @ 7:06 am

The Panasonic Lumix L1 is a catastrophe

Much as I predicted a couple of months back the Panasonic Lumix L1 which has just hit the market is nothing short of a catastrophe as photographic tools go. This is Panasonic’s first attempt at a DSLR with removable lenses so you would think it should be good. For $2,000 you get what sounds like a nice Leica lens and decent manual controls. You also get about the worst viewfinder possible and no image buffer, meaning that shooting in RAW demands a five second pause between pictures while the camera saves the image direct to the card.

A remarkably objective review by Michael Reichmann – remarkable as he admits the camera was a loaner so you would think he would make nice – confirms my earlier conjecture that the use of the lousy viewfinder from the Olympus Evolt E-330 would make the L1 a lousy camera, and adds the killer point about the absence of the RAW buffer. Thank you for your candor, Mr. Reichmann.

Sure, Panasonic seems to have cured the worst of its noise problems in the images, but that’s hardly much use when you can barely see what the devil you are photographing in the first place.

I have not used the L1 and am not about to. Suffice it to say that he compares the viewfinder unfavorably to the one in the Canon Rebel 350. That I have used and must say the viewfinder in the Rebel is underwhelming to the point of mediocrity, as the image is so small. At least it’s bright. The 5D is fine, just like a regular SLR if not Leica bright, so you can see where I am coming from. Then again, at $3,000 the 5D had better be good.

Leave this camera to the Leica fetishists who will buy it because it looks like a Leica M rangefinder which, I suppose, is about as bad a reason to buy a camera as I can think of.

Update as of November 11, 2006: I retract what I wrote about Reichmann’s apparent objectivity, above. Please read the following journal entry.

August 20, 2006

Adding sound to QTVR panoramas – Part III

Filed under: QTVR, Sound — Thomas Pindelski @ 7:32 am

Alternatives and first field experience.

The weekend finds me in the Bay Area and whatever you may say of the frenetic pace, the overcrowding and the relentless drive for this year’s BMW, the environment does come with lots of great sound locations, so naturally the Edirol R-09 sound recorder came with me.

First, a few words about alternatives. In this price range, meaning $400 or less, I could only find two. One is the add on option for an iPod which is reputed to have very poor sound quality. Plus my 60gB iPod is full, so that’s a non-starter.

The other is the M-Audio MicroTrack 24/96 which, like the Edirol, retails at $400, looks less chintzy, is similarly sized and also records on a small camera card. In this case on a CF card.

I turned this one down for a couple of reasons. First, it uses an internal, sealed battery (in contrast to the removeable AAs used by the Edirol) so that when you are out of power you either have to use the mains adapter (impossible in the field, obviously) or put the device out of commission while you recharge. That means the bulky recharger travels with you and when the internal battery eventually fails the whole unit is toast until repaired. Not good. Second, the supplied stereo microphone has to be plugged in and the thing looks pretty fragile sticking out of the end of the gadget. One more thing to lose or go wrong. So I decided in favor of the Edirol. All other better quality portable digital recorders seem to be much more expensive and/or bulky.

The morning found me at the excellent Hiller Aviation Museum which just happened to be hosting a model train show with lots of great crowd sounds waiting to be recorded. I set input gain on ‘AGC’, meaning Automatic Gain Control, and followed the model trains around with the recorder. Recording quality was set to best MP3 (WAV can be used for the very best uncompressed quality which I thought would be overkill in this case) as I reasoned I could always compress the file to something smaller using Audacity. To keep things discreet I dispensed with monitoring headphones and just let the AGC do its thing.

On the upper level of the museum there is a loudspeaker broadcasting the airport control tower traffic controllers’ voices (all that ‘One-Niner’ stuff you hear in movies) so I recorded a one minute burst of that, aided by the sound of a low flying plane coming in to land at the immediiately adjacent San Carlos Airport.

Popping the card in the reader attached to my iBook a few minutes later disclosed that all was well. The sounds were atmospherically rendered, the background noise below the threshold of hearing and the stereo effect surprisingly good for so small a device with such limited microphone separation. The AGC works well, sacrificing dynamic range for an absence of clipping on loud sounds – ideal for my intended use with QTVR panoramas.

Later that afternoon, a quick check of the Caltrain schedule disclosed that the downtown train would pass through the station in Burlingame at 2:28 pm so I trotted over, Edirol in hand, and caught the train crossing Broadway to the accompaniment of ringing bells and diesel sounds. Dashing down to the front of the train as it sat in the station I reccorded the air blast as the brakes were released and the diesel started up on its journey south, accompanied by much squealing of steel wheels on rails. Very atmospheric. AGC struggled here as the dynamic range between the loud whistle of the train and the ambient sound level must have been over 90dB and in a couple of spots the mics shut down, so I had to edit those out using Audacity.

One thing I quickly learned about the little iPod earphones (the Edirol comes without headphones of any kind) is that they may be great for listening to playback but that they are useless for monitoring while you record, as they do very little to attenuate ambient sound, thus making it difficult to distinguish recording from original. What is called for here is a true set of over-the-ear sound isolating headphones which, let’s face it, would be a pretty ridiculous load to carry with the diminutive Edirol.

The Edirol did a great job in almost all cases and is so easily tucked in a trouser or vest pocket as to become an indispensible companion. Despite the generally prosaic looks of the device, the display is truly wonderful, as the twin sound level meters are back lit and stark white against a black background. They are clearly visible in even the brightest light. Crank them up to maximum brightness and they really shine. Canon could use this sort of thing to replace the truly lousy LCD screens in their 5D and 350D cameras which wash out in all but the poorest light. One ergonomic boo-boo is that the microphones face the same way as the display, meaning that if you point them towards a sound source in front of you you cannot see the sound level meters! Mercifully, AGC seems to do such a great job of automatic input level control that you quickly forget to worry about input sound levels. Rotatable mics would be a nice touch, Roland.

Had you told me three months ago that I would be recording a collection of sounds for my photo library I would have politely excused myself with a hint that a visit to a shrink might be in order. It’s expensive at $400 but a great and unobtrusive device for recording high quality sound tracks in WAV or MP3 format which can be attached to QTVR panoramas with very little effort. A related use for true still pictures would be to attach the sound track to a slide show created in, say, iTunes, and show the whole thing to your audience with sound included. A whole new realm of possibilities opens up with this fascinating tool.

August 18, 2006

Adding sound to QTVR panoramas – Part II

Filed under: Panoramas, QTVR — Thomas Pindelski @ 6:32 am

Batteries not included! Heck, lotsa things not included.

I looked at incorporating public domain sound into QTVR panoramas in Part I. How about recording your own sound track?

Meet the latest addition to the digital household:

Made by the fellas who gave us all those rock-’n-roll consoles, Roland, it is mightily costly at $400 (whadya expect? It’s made in Japan, not China), comes with no batteries, an insanely chintzy 64 mB SD card for storing recordings (a leaf out of the digital camera makers’ book – at least Canon has the good sense to include no card with the 5D) and no headphones.

Appropriately enough, Marty Paris, ace acoustical guitarist and local UPS driver, just delivered it so we got to chatting about sound recording. “Wait a minute”, he intoned, “I thought you were a photographer?”. “My dear Marty”, quoth I, with that bemused look of pity and understanding we sound panographers reserve for the unenlightened, “Photography is sound!”. “What?”. “Hey, you know, QTVR and all that. Imagine your band with 360 panoamas and sound, man”. Note the ‘man’ bit. A little bit of hip. Big thing in the musical world, I’m told.

So I open the box and find that this little MP3/WAV sound recorder, which will serve to add sound to my QTVR panoramas – no more public domain stuff for this operator – comes without batteries. Gee, is that cheap or what? No problem. Two AA sized NiMh batteries, which have yet to explode or catch fire, are resurrected from one of the chargers in the ancestral manse, and hey presto!, she fires up.

OK, so the R09 records on an SD card. The 64 mB card included with the R09 can record just about all the true statements from all of the USA’s senators and congressmen made over the past decade, which means 5 minutes’ worth, at best quality. Well, the spare 1 gB card for the Leica DP comes out and truth, justice and the American Way (or, at best, the prospect thereof) are restored.

How large is the Edirol R09? Judge for yourself – that’s the 1 gB SD card on top of the iPod and the picture is about life size on my iMac:

Feel? Positively chintzy compared to the iPod, and the flimsy combined door for the two AA batteries and the SD card is a problem waiting to happen unless it loosens up with use. Indeed, one of the first things you see on opening the box is a warning to the effect that the battery/card door is easily damaged. Not good. How about redsigning it, Roland, rather than hiding behind lawyers and disclaimers? Add the fact that the supplied (useless) charger cannot recharge NiMh batteries in the R09 means the door will get a lot of action as batteries are removed for recharging and replacement. I suppose you could argue the charger can be used for running the R09 off mains power, but given that it’s twice the size and six times the weight of the R09 you know what you can do with it.

Another useless accessory is the provided USB II cable to connect the R09 to your Mac. In practice, you simply remove the SD card and pop it in your card reader which displays all the MP3 or WAV files on the card. Nor do you even need to format the card in the R09, despite dire warnings in Roland’s instruction book. The 1 gB Sandisk Extreme III card formatted in my Lumix worked fine in the R09. Nice. At a pinch you could mix MP3 and JPG/TIFF/RAW files on the one card.

In fairness, one reason for the light weight of the R09 is that there is no hard disk inside, unlike in my 60 gB iPod. Recorded sounds are stored on the miniscule SD card, meaning the device should be fairly shock resistant as there is a near total absence of moving parts.

Roland claims a battery life of 4 hours continuous recording (at least small stereo microphones are built in – you can see them in the snap above) so figuring in the ‘Washington factor’ (when you hear your taxes will go up by 5%, multiply by four) that works out at one hour, which is still a lot, given that the average loop for a QTVR panorama is some 60 seconds long. Even my boy reciting his ABCs takes less time than that!

Monitor your recording or listen to the playback using the R09? No such luck. No earphones are included. Fortunately, I saved mine from the iPod (a device I use connected to the home AV system, not to my long suffering ear drums) and the R09 can be monitored just fine:

Note the sad and unsuccessful attempt to emulate the superb iPod ‘click-wheel’. Aren’t patents wonderful?

So we have here a very expensive, crappy looking device, with a miniscule SD card, no batteries, no earphones, a useless charger, unnecessary cables, no case and the usual 102 page booklet (hell, you press ‘Rec’ and have at it – you need a 100+ pages of legalese to tell me how to work this thing?) So how does it work? Stay tuned for Part III.

August 17, 2006

More on single image tone mapping

Filed under: Technique — Thomas Pindelski @ 9:20 am

A useful technique for managing dynamic range.

I made mention of the single image capabilities of the tone mapping Photoshop plug-in from Photomatix here.

This technique may not be as effective as using three images – under exposed, normal and overexposed – but is ideal when the subject is moving or when older pictures have to be restored. For film user I would think it is invaluable.

When I first got my Canon 5D one of the early excursions made with it was to Limekiln State Park to test the image stabilization in the 24-105mm ‘L’ lens. It proved remarkably effective and I took a bunch of pictures at 1/4 – 1/15 second or so using just a monopod for support.

That experience is recounted here.

Originally published here the pictures may have been blur free but suffered from the most horrible loss of detail in the highlghts and shadows. So I went back and applied single image tone mapping to the twelve best with the results you can see here.

I have found it’s very easy to overdo things and step over the line to the garish, so I tend to leave the ‘Strength’ slider at the default of 40% (this one has a high ‘garish risk’) and generally crank up the ‘Luminosity’ and ‘Color Saturation’ sliders a tad. If the overall image is too dark a tweak of the ‘White Clip’ slider to the right usually suffices. After saving, a final adjustment of Levels (Apple-L) in Photoshop is all that is needed. You can see the plug-in sliders here:

A very useful tool to have in the photographer’s tool chest.

August 16, 2006

QTVR panoramas on my web site

Filed under: Panoramas, QTVR — Thomas Pindelski @ 7:23 am

Time to make these a page on the site.

I have assembled some of my recent panoramas on my web site and, to make them easily accessible, have added a Menu option on the Main Page. Click the Menu then click on ‘The Panoramas’.

Alternatively, you can go directly to the panorama index page by clicking here. Recommended especially for Safari users, as this web bowser is especially bad at refreshing its cached history of web pages.

Can panoramas be photographic fine art? I have absolutely no doubt – if art is something that evokes emotions and feelings, then the answer has to be a resounding Yes. Who could not thrill to the strains of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde in Redwood Valhalla?

August 15, 2006

Another sound panorama

Filed under: Panoramas — Thomas Pindelski @ 10:29 am

Not quite Renoir, but it will do for now.

Renoir’s Bal au Moulin de la Galette is as good as it gets. Suffused with warmth, gaiety, movement, sheer joy, modern crowd scenes simply cannot improve on this masterpiece.

But Renoir did not have QTVR + sound, though he came awfully close. I swear I can hear the revellers in his magnificent canvas. And look how tightly he crops his composition!

Here is my own pathetic imitation.

Click here

[tags]QuickTime, Panoramas, Digital sound recording[/tags]

August 14, 2006

Strong foregrounds make for strong panoramas

Filed under: Panoramas — Thomas Pindelski @ 7:06 am

Close foreground details makes for heightened drama.

I’m learning that QTVR panoramas are similar to using a very wide angle lens in conventional photography. Meaning that if the foreground is devoid of close, sharp details, likely as not the result will be disappointing.

The broken limb in this example – visible when the panorama first opens, was so close to the fish eye lens that it actually touched the front element at one point as I tried to gain a reasonably solid position for the tripod in what has to be years of dead leaves on the ground. Once again HDR techniques were used in this very challenging lighting.

Click here

August 13, 2006

Thrill to the sights and sounds of racing Porsches

Filed under: Panoramas — Thomas Pindelski @ 10:59 am

Your intrepid panographer checks in from the Laguna Seca racetrack paddock.

Next weekend sees the Monterey Historics with Monterey and Pebble Beach overrun with tourists ogling the million dollar machinery on display and for sale.

The Laguna Seca track is as bad – hour long queues to get in.

The smart money goes to the racetrack the weekend before where all is calm, all the cars are there and twenty visitors turn up. Entrance to everything is free. I’m fortunte that the track is just 100 miles north of home. The mechanics and drivers – many of them retired famous racers – are relaxed, friendly and very accommodating. Until you have seen GP motorbikes or old Formula One cars take the Corkscrew at full chat you have not lived. As great race track corners go, perhaps only the Casino Hairpin in Monaco is more famous.

The paddock contains everything from true amateurs with no budget and one car trailered in to multi-million dollar marketing operations which think nothing of thrashing their pristine $2mm Ferrari Testa Rossas around the track at race speeds.

I took the attached yesterday in the Griot’s tent – more racing Porsches and the like than you could shake a stick at.

And in case you want to know, the sound track is of four great Porsches (aren’t all Porsches great?) – the 904, the 911 turbo, the 935 and the fabulous 956.

Click here

The sounds come from four tracks here and were joined end to end using a fine free application named Audacity.

The mechanics were nice enough to allow me, clunky tripod and pano head and all, into their tent.

One ‘pro’ with a Nikon and a two foot long lens – more boring pix of cars on the track – eyed my strange panorama rig with interest but male pride prevented him from asking what the hell I was doing. Shame – he might have learned something.

What on earth possessed me to sell my pristine 1967 911?

The author’s much missed 1967 911 with wife. I kept the wife.

Change or die

Filed under: Panoramas — Thomas Pindelski @ 7:32 am

It has long been my motto, or mantra now that I’m a Californian, that you either ‘Change or Die’. It is instructive to consider this in the light of the equipment change my landscape photography has undergone during the past year:

Before:

Rollei 6003 + 45 degree prism
40mm, 80mm and 150mm Rollei lenses
Rolls of 120 Kodak Portra VC160 film
A Crown Graphic 4″ x 5″ camera with 90mm, 135mm and 210mm lenses
Several film holders for the above
A dark cloth and loupe to focus the bloody thing
A cable release
My old Linhof tripod
My even older Weston Master V exposure meter
A bad back from carrying all that stuff

After:

Canon EOS 5D
Canon 15mm fisheye lens
King Pano panoramic head
A two axis bubble level
A spare 1 gB CF card
An overpriced Canon ‘cable’ release
My old Linhof tripod
A headache from trying to remember to do everything right (strictly a hardware problem, I assure you)
And, shortly, an iPod-sized digital sound recorder

The software change has been no less dramatic.

Before:

Silverfast Ai for scanning the negatives
Photoshop CS2

After:

Aperture
Photoshop CS2
Photmatix Pro (for HDR rendition)
Photomatix Photoshop plug-in
Panagea Photoshop plug-in
PT Mac (to stitch panoramas)
ImageAlign Photoshop plug-in (to defish zenith and nadir images)
Cubic Converter (to adjust QT defaults)
Cubic Connector (to add sound)
QuickTime (free from Apple for Macs or PCs)
And probably some other things I cannot recall

I don’t think my mantra would be disappointed.

Back-end hardware remains unchanged – the superb Apple iMac G5

And, yes, you can do QTVR panoramas with film gear, but that’s about as sane as driving a Hummer with $4 gas on the horizon.

August 12, 2006

Adding sound to QTVR panoramas – Part I

Filed under: Panoramas, Sound — Thomas Pindelski @ 3:03 am

The penultimate enhancement.

Well, over the past few days my feet and the tripod’s have been buried in sand and in running water. Five wet feet….

The QTVR + HDR accompanying this column, from Limekiln State Park in central California, despite using three pictures for each of the eight components of the panorama, renders the running water quite nicely. Note also the great shadow detail in the trunks of the massive redwoods thanks to the HDR process – no way that I can see conventional single shot exposures capable of this.

But the picture alone is not enough.

After asking around a bit and being met with stone cold silence, I spent the morning searching the web for some way of adding sound to my QTVR panoramas. QuickTime, even in its upgraded ‘Pro’ version, does not let you do this with VR movies, only with regular movies. Shame.

Well, after much searching the answer lay no further than the boys at ClickHere Design, the good folks in Australia who make CubicConverter to allow adjustment of default settings on QTVR movies. In addition to being great cricketers, the Aussies make great software and Foster’s beer – a fine race. The application is named Cubic Connector.

CubicConnector does far more than add sound. It permits creation of an interactive web design with clickable hot spots. When clicked, these hot spots, which can be superimposed on a map, take the user to a VR movie of the location selected. That’s the ultimate and it will take a few more trips to Limekiln for me to complete a comprehensive, QTVR, map and panorama web page which will give the viewer an experience close to being there. Sorry, no way I know of adding the fabulous aroma of a redwood forest. Maybe Apple will do that in the next version of QuickTime?!

CubicConnector also allows presetting of panning actions and speeds, which I have used here; you can override it and pan in any direction, including up and down, by using the mouse. The file is 7mB so it will take a few moments to load – 25 secconds on my broadband connection. Enjoy!

Limekiln State Park, CA in sight and sound – click here

If you want to add sound to your QTVRs, buy Cubic Converter and CubicConnector together at $99, not like I did at $79 each.

I will look at recording your own sound track in Part II.

August 11, 2006

Be sceptical

Filed under: Hall of Shame, Photography — Thomas Pindelski @ 9:25 am

It’s the only way to be sure.

Long time readers will know of my extreme scepticism when it comes to the press, be it photography related or general news. Now Reuters has ‘fessed up that one of its photographers in Lebanon was doctoring pictures to make palls of smoke over Beirut larger. As the examples below show it is Photoshop stamp-and-clone work of the crudest possible kind.

Subsequent investigation by Reuters disclosed that this photographer had done this before, Photoshopping Israeli jets firing flares to look as if they were firing multiple rockets.

Photoshop has its uses in the artistic photography world – I do not hesitate to use it to clean things up – but has no place in objective news reporting. Ansel Adams would never pass for a press photographer, most of his images having been heavily doctored in the darkroom. Nothing wrong with that. Doctoring has its place, just not in news photography.

When I was a boy one tended to trust two or three news sources – the BBC, Time and CBS. No more. The BBC has acquired the default left wing bias of most news services, Time famously demonized the police mug shot of O. J. Simpson on its cover before the case even came to trial (another Photoshop session, albeit more skilful than the Reuters one) and CBS, well, everyone knows about Dan Rather.

So when you next see a picture or a purportedly ‘independent’ review of a piece of photo gear, play it safe. Assume everything you read is doctored and take it from there. That way your chances of being misled are lower. And when it comes to Wall Street, redouble your scepticism.

Reuters fired the photographer, by the way. Had he worked for the New York Times he would even now be proclaiming his First Amendment rights.

Single image tone mapping

Filed under: Photography, Technique — Thomas Pindelski @ 6:46 am

The Photomatix plug-in does a great job.

While the few QTVR HDR panoramas I have published here over the past few days have used three images per constituent shot, melded in PhotomatixPro, the related Photomatix plug-in for Photoshop also does a very decent job of restoring highlight and shadow detail using but a single image.

It only works on 16 bit images, so you may first have to go to the Image->Mode menu to convert the image to 16 bit (the size doubles but no quality gain results) before running the plug-in. Remember to revert to 8-bit when done or waste storage space on your hard disc.

Here are two fisheye shots, straightened in ImageAlign, one reproduced without and the other with single image tone mapping. The effect is superior to the Shadow and Highlight slider in Photoshop.

The straight shot, exposed for the mid-tones

The same picture after using the Photomatix tone mapping plug-in

As you can see, the recovery of shadow detail is remarkeable.

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