dusk moon

With absolutely no regularity whatsoever, google photos occasionally sends me "hey, these are the photos you took on this day last year!" reminders. 

Here is a photo I made on March 18, 2016, in Cambridge, MA, of a gorgeous waxing 3/4 moon bright in a dusk sky. I was wandering around geocaching while waiting to join F for a gallery showing of "Not Art". 

This wasn't in a gallery, or tagged on a bus stop shelter, but it was certainly nature's art. I barely did it justice by photographing it with my phone. Kind of makes me want to get back to photography in a serious way. 

A view to Portland Harbor

When I regularly made photography, a long time ago, I came to accept that there were certain things that our eyes could see, and our senses could be lit up by, that simply couldn't be meaningfully recorded on film.

Yes, it was film, but the same holds for megapixels on my spacephone.

The sun is dancing in a bright glare over the harbor, the wind pushing the water along in a billion tiny diamonds.

I can't be the only person in downtown Portland who has been delighted by this this morning. But it wouldn't surprise me if in the only one who has now spent ten minutes looking at it and appreciating it.

Cameras. and tomatoes!

Okay, so in this post anyway, the tomatoes are really mostly a prop for the cameras. More gardening to follow!

This is comparing my existing digital camera, a Panasonic DMC ZS-19, 14.1mp, a nice camera that is about as feature-filled as you can get in a compact with the new, ultracompact Nikon S01 (10mp) I just bought because I really want something smaller and lighter I can carry around consistently in my pocket.

Both shots were taken with the camera on Auto mode, auto flash (neither fired), at the same distance. This is a screenshot, which of course has its own limitations, but shows the color represented the same way.

Really, the ultracompact S01 takes a pretty solid shot, at least in full daylight, with no zoom. (Haven't had the chance to compare them yet with moving subjects, in lower light, indoors, etc.) The green of the tomato plant is better represented in the more expensive and larger Panasonic, and the Nikon gets a little washed out at the outer edges (upper right) of the soil. But really, a pretty damn impressive showing for a camera that measures almost exactly 2" by 3" (smaller than a credit card!) and weighs only 3.4 ounces all in, with almost 8gb of internal memory. I prefer cameras I can take a memory card out of for easier downloading, but I'll deal.

What I really ought to do is another comparison that includes the DSLR Canon Rebel, and Canon Rebel XT.

I know: you're all waiting with baited breath, right?

Photoz

I think I might have some photos for you soon!

A few you've already seen, but I just set up the desktop computer yesterday after months in storage / boxes. This is copying the contents of the SD card (~720 items, ~3.5gb) from my main digital camera to the desktop so I can empty it.

Digital photography

When we had dinner with friends in Denver last week, one of the things that came up is the having too many digital photographs to deal with. I mentioned, as has occurred to me many times, how different it is that when I had to carefully compose every shot, think about the aperture and shutter speed, depth of field, and so on.When you had 12, 24, or 36 shots to work with, and then had to drop it off at the pharmacy or photofinisher, or develop and print it yourself. Develop the film, examine the negatives, maybe print a contact sheet, print some or all.

Point being, you really had to think carefully about each shot. Now with digital cameras, you can just take five (or twenty) shots, and hope one of them comes out.

Some flies in the ointment, though: organization, storage, and just never going through the gazillions of photos you now have.

Case in point: I just downloaded 273 photos from three CF cards from my DSLR. Many of them are duplicates of a given shot. And now I'll have to go through them, delete the ones I don't like, maybe crop some, upload them to this blog, or just let them sit indefinitely.

Another example: my Pictures folder on this computer has 21,425 items in it, totaling 43.1 gb. And this isn't my only Pictures folder.

Ugh. On which note, here is one of the 273 photos:

These are stuffed mushrooms I made last night: the filling is the stems, garlic, jalapenos, and sun-dried tomatoes. This is the dish I refrigerated them in; the rest of the series includes my usual play by play cooking photos, which will likely get their own blog post later. Which tends to lead to, well, needing to download 273 photos.

Banana panorama!

Okay, I'm arguably conflating bananas and panoramas, rather than posting a panoama of bananas. But hey, they rhyme, and I have images of both. Good times!

This is what I like my bananas to look like. Ripe and brown and ready. Yum!

And this is, as panoramas from my balcony go, a perfectly good one:

Horizontal (not rotating the camera)

Vertical (camera rotated 90 degrees.)

Generating panoramas definitely works better when I used a tripod, and using the vertical shooting format (at least when I want to highlight the sky.) We'll see if I remember that in the future.

Hiking panoramas!

As promised in a recent post about my hiking on the AT, here are a couple photos from my AT hike. Specifically, panoramas from atop Blood Mountain, Georgia:

What is kind of interesting is that they are essentially the exact same shot, taken from the exact same position, seconds apart. The only difference is that the first one was taken with the camera in a vertical (rotated 90 degrees) position, while the second one was taken with the camera in standard position. Relatively little difference, though I actually expected a little more.

Fog & rain

A few new panoramas from ATL's fog and rain, and then snow, last week:

Are the panoramas getting to be like the food porn?

Here is an inside panorama, from the bedroom/office:

And while this also isn't the worst preview I've seen, it demonstrates reasonably well how bad the previews can look:

Panorama redux, uhhhh, x4!

Okay, yep: I just had to ignore hugin's bad preview function. This is an example of how it shows up in the preview, and for whatever reason, this is far from the worst example of the preview:

The weird shadow-like rectangular shapes are an example of how the preview doesn't work well. In other previews, there were half a dozen variously diagonally tilted shadowboxes, making the image look far worse, and basically unusable. Here is the actual output for this image:

And here are a few more panoramas over a few days. Close to sunset:

Same time of day, taken in horizontal format:

And here's a weird, super narrow vertical view, since I was using the telephoto lens fully zoomed in (55mm):

Several comments I read online indicated that using the lens zoomed out would, for various obscure reasons, result in a better quality panorama. Unfortunately, for the images from my balcony, a telephone zoom at even 55mm is too much to make the image interesting, since it loses the sky and perspective of the buildings.

Panorama redux!

Since I generated and put together the last panorama, I've been getting increasingly frustrated with hugin, the panorama software for linux. Every time I generated a preview, it looked like hell, with weird box-like transparencies showing up throughout the image.

Turns out I just needed to ignore the preview, and generate the panorama, and it looks great:


That was taken about 8 this morning, as that storm begins to blow in from the west. Now I'm going to work through the other four or five folders of raw images and see if I can generate a few more.

Other worthwhile stuff I'm getting done today: writing down bicycle serial numbers and putting business cards in seatposts to aid in recovery if any of our bikes are ever stolen, advice from this great post from an ABC member, lessons from a recovered bike theft .

Panorama!

Per A's suggestion, I tried shooting a panoramic view from our balcony. The first attempt, a week or so ago, didn't have nearly enough points for the software (autopanog) to map between the images, so I took another set.

Here is the version shot using a standard horizontal orientation, which shows a 180 degree panorama from the balcony:

Unfortunately, as you see, the horizontal approach forces me to crop off the tops of the nearby buildings.

But for some reason, the vertical approach didn't do the exposure blending correctly, so I need to keep working on it.