Going Wide Angle on a Cameraphone

 

For PhotoFriday‘s Topic Wide Angle

I’m sure something like this must have has already been tried. Here I have used 4 photos taken on my android cameraphone, stitched them with Microsoft Research's ICE software and uploaded the resulting image to Microsoft Research's Photosythn. Zoom in with your mouse and look around, not bad resolution for a cameraphone. The big drawback in this image however is the horizon is a very wobbly line.

Making it look easy

I really enjoyed the drawing and writing course run this weekend by the Broadland Art Centre, called “An Illustrated Norfolk Journal”. Here David Hurrell is demonstrating how just three colours, cobalt blue, light red and yellow ochre can be used to develop a typical Norfolk scene, with just a touch of help from some extra viridian (to help the foreground vegetation) and a thin lemon yellow wash to add sunshine (David’s word). Damn he makes it look so easy.
You can see the scene in the middle of the panaroma from How Hill (above) click on this photosynth image and use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out (or use the plus minus boxes. Your mouse movement will pan you across the image. Find the wind pump down beside the river. Find how many boats are visible on the broads. What are the couple on the right doing in the bushes? Click on the little rectangular icon, with a solid square inside it, to make the image full screen then scroll around you'll be amazed. This photosynth is made out of 14 overlapping photos and constructed with microsoft's ICE software
 
So maybe my sketched book is light on actual sketches but it is bursting with writing, painting ideas and experiments. Did I mention I took lots of photos! Most importantly I found inspiration and new techniques and especially new greens, ways to look at gates. To look up for inspiring skys and forest canopies and down to avoid stinging nettles and the cow pats.

Thanks Angela, David and Nina for a great course. Highly Recommended

PhotoFriday :: Many

For PhotoFridayis Topic Many
This is a re-processing of the same multi-image panorama I took for the he’s leaving home post about the Australasian Gannets at Cape Kidnappers in New Zealand. This time I have used Microsoft’s ICE (image composite editor) to do the stitching using a horizontal spherical projection, rather than the default cylindrical projection.. Why horizontal? I’m not sure, I always thought spheres where equi-dimensional in the vertical and horizontal directions. Did they mean elliptical projection. No matter I was able to reduce the curvature in the horizon and build a larger image than I can in autostitch. I even found out my image covers 182.2° horizontally and 42.3° vertically, such precision and only based on 12 photos taken hand held. The resulting panorama is so big  in fact it defies reproducing for a blog (the image above is only 2% of its full 123MB potential) so I have also loaded it into Photosythyn so you can zoom in and have a good look around and even count how many birds there are.

PhotoProject :: Earth Day a Broader View

As a second PhotoProject view for Earth Day I wanted to get a BIG landscape view of the park at the end of my street  This 100MB Photosynth was created from just 21 individual photos (hand held)using the microsoft Live add-in ICE and then uploaded to Photosythn.

Please zoom in and enjoy the park and sunny day. How many boys on bikes can you find?

New Windows Live Photo Gallery (Beta)

The new Beta is available for Windows Live essentials (its kind of hidden away so here is a link to download it now). One of the new items is a revamp of Live Photo Gallery. One thing I noticed straight away is that it is extremely fast (compared with Picasa & Photoshop organiser) and I mean lightening fast. Maybe I just haven’t loaded enough photos into it yet! Ok while writing this, I got live gallery to scan this PC and external USB Drive for photos, it did it in less than 10 minutes, around quarter of a million images, that’s really good (two hours faster than PSE organiser)  and it is still fast.

So “Is it a good Photo Manager?”

Certainly YES. Window Live Photo Gallery has all the basic editing functions (plus a decent noise reduction filter) It supports organisation by Date/Time (the default), People (but a manumatic face recognition) General Tags and Geotags, it even keeps track of what you have “published” to the web and where. It has tags, captions and a 5 star rating system. It also has nice features to appropriately resize for emails, to publish directly to facebook & flickr and even makes maintain backups and shareable albums on you own personal Sky Drive. It has a very simple easy to use camera import facilities and seems to handle of  the image and Video format I have tried. I did have to download some extra Codec for my Raw files (BTW the Pentax Supplied Codec only work in Vista or windows 7). So if you have a microsoft Vista or Windows 7 based PC, a new digital camera and/or a camera phone you should consider downloading it now, its free!

Is it as good as Photoshop?

Well NO, but… Photo shop has way more features,  PS & PSE are expensive and spoken of with great reverence by many bloggers and expert photographers. However I can also let you into an unspoken truth, the Photoshop family of photo editors, perhaps with the exception of lightroom are blotted, chronically slow and can be extremely tedious to learn and use efficiently. Yet PhotoShop can do some magic in the right hands and make other packages look ordinary in comparison. So for the vast majority of new camera user who don’t want to spend hours tweaking their photos or don’t already have Photoshop and one or more of those many glossy How to Photoshop books, Live Photo Gallery is much easier to use software to start with and its free.

Ok then “Its it a Picasa Killer App?”

Probably NOT. It doesn’t have a lot of the feature Picasa offers, like automatic face recognition, printing large posters, collages, HTML web galleries, screen savers, making movies from still images, backup & Gift CD/DVDs and the nice integration with the On-line Picasa Web Album, with its well thought out security/collaboration options. I’m sure there are more features I’ve overlooked, Picasa is an established and well liked application, something I would still highly recommend to a new digital camera owner. The one thing loyal picasa users are complaining about in all the forums at the moment is how slow picasa is getting, and I agree. The integration of Sky Drive into Live Photo Gallery gives you a personal place for photographic albums & archives in the Cloud, this is possibly its best and most important differentiating feature.  Live Photo Gallery does have a nice Panoramic photo stitcher built in and good integration with Photosynth.  So I think this upgrade to Live Photo Gallery is very timely and it has some great potentials and I for one will be running it on my desktop PC in parallel with picasa for a while to come.

Movie Maker, Live Mail and Messenger have also had decent overhauls and Live Writer, which I am using to make this blog post now has the new office style ribbon. So do they all. I’m not really sold on the Ribbon, I was quiet happy back in the office XP/2003 style menus.

Did I mention Live Photo Gallery is fast?

The Full 360

This 130 megapixel photosynth is based on 37 photo. It was taken handheld just south of Beach One at venus bay and illustrates the recent erosion at the back of the beach. The photosythyn was created by Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor).

VACS Exhibition 2010 as a virtual tour

I have a few works in this Years Venus Artists Contemporary Showcase. So I have decided to try and create a virtual tour. It may not be anywhere close to visiting the exhibitio0n yourself but I hope you can get to appreciate the works.

You can use seadragon (above) to click on the panoramam and zoom in and out or pan along using just your mouse. If you are accessing this on a microsoft windows based machine, you can enjoy an "almost" 3D virtual tour through the exhibition by clicking on the photosynth below.


The exhibition is open daily 10:00am to 4:00pm until Sunday 21st. At The Venus Bay Community Centre, 27 Canterbury Road. Venus Bay

Chainsaw Art

Another Photosynth, this time prepared as a "walk around". This photoset was taken at mga's "materpiece in a Day" Novemeber 2009.

Sorry Mac & Linux users,Photosythn still only works for Microsoft Windows.

Pivot Collections

Microsoft’s Live Labs have been doing some more neat things with sea dragon (the software engine behind photosythn). There latest experiment is called Pivot and it tries to address how you might interact with massive amounts of data, and especially pictures. It is out on a limited beta release and you need an invite to try it out (you can find access codes at the end of this post) and it is well worth a look now. My head is already spinning with the possibilities of creating my own pivot collections.

What are Collections

In a technical sense collections are just a large group of images (the must be in deep zoom format for sea dragon) with an XML schema. Ok too much detail. Collections are a grouping of images (or text segments) that are in someway grouped into similar items. All the images come from the web, but the searching and zooming is remarkably fast. There can be several levels of grouping, so hierarchies are easy to represent and they can link onto other websites. This is controllable by the person creating the collection. For now there are only a few example collections and be warned they are very USA-centric but looking at them is the best way to understand the excitement.

Browsing a Collection

The real power of pivot is really in the hands of the viewer. You really need to see this for yourself. For example I looked at the 2009 IUCN Red List of endangered species, and there are close to 3000 species. So I fist looked at birds then limited that to Australasia , and wow there are a lot of Australian birds on the list. The big shock was when I sorted them by by Order, suddenly i saw the group of birds I was regularly photographing, the seabirds were disproportionally high in terms of red list species. It is a little hard to describe the flow or you query in a text document with few screen captures but you can zoon in and out with the mouse as well as interact with the collection structure (a list of categories over on the right hand side of the screen). For The record the most endangered Australia species is the orange bellied parrot, no news there but my little friends the hooded plovers are there on the near threatened list.

Access Code

When I requested my invite I got an access code good for 10 downloads and I have already used 1. So all you need to do is be one of the next nine to download pivot and enter this code.
63EA 2482 730D 80C9
If you miss out, don’t stress, just follow the need an invite button on the download page.

Dropping in on another artist

Norman Lindsay's property at Springwood is now also managed as a Gallery & Museum by the National Trust. It preserves his painting and etching studios. His art covers a wide range of creative endeavours from cartoonist, children stories, paintings watercolours and etchings. Often of full figured female nudes, which lead to his frequent conflicts with the wowsers of his time.

The 1993 film Sirens, starring Elle Macpherson and the little known (at the time) Hugh Grant, is a somewhat romantic portrayal of Norman Lindsay life at Springwood. Most of Norman Lindsay's sculptures where construction on site in his garden as a form of relaxation, using wet concrete over a metal frame. I trust my Photosynth below gives you some inkling of his Olympian dream.

more on photosynth

This is a nice walkthrough of some of the opportunities and amazing capabilities microsoft’s http://photosynth.net/photosynth opens up for digital photographers

more synth-ony

This is my "over the top", attempt at a "full immersion" photosynth, which has not worked out quiet as I expected. A lot of the obvious connections between the panorama sets haven't connected and there are some large jumps in the flow. I took 16 separate multi-image panorama (see below, click on them to see more detail), while walking through this picnic pavilion and along the edge of the lake. Still it is huge, 171 images in all, and gives me encouragement that a "deep" experience may be possible. I'll just have to research more how to handle seeing around corners!

 

  

 

 

 

Photosynth'ing

Microsoft's Live Labs have released a new free photo service called photosynth. It is a photo splicing service with a difference, its uses lots of images with lots of overlap to create a convincing 3D view that you can zoom in and out "smoothly" around pan around the scene. Such facilities are not new to the web many real estate site now use walkthroughs, but this is pretty impressive and you can create your own, without much effort. there are two technologies involved the first is the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a bunch of flat photographs, and the second independent technology, called seadragon, that allows seamless scrolling through 100 of MB over the Internet.

There are two parts to creating your own synths. You must first register at the service, (for which you need a windows live ID) then download a small uploaded application, that not only help you prepare the images and upload them but monitors the splicing process.

 

There are a few crucial limitations. All syths become public (ie can be viewed by anyone via the internet) but you do have the option of setting the licensing (full copyright or a creative commons) during the upload process. Results can only be viewed on PCs running XP or Vista, which must run the direct-X photosynth add-in for Internet explorer. The 20GB of space seems generous, but you will use this up fast.

One downside is the bandwidth required, I have downloaded it, set it up and uploaded my first project using free wifi at an airline lounge that dropped out a few times so I had to be very very patient!