Finding a way to something like little planets

I was back at the Queenscliff observation tower yesterday and took another overlapping series. It occured to me that it might make a nice series for a little planet image. I’m still travelling and don’t have all my little software utilities with me, and my first attempt was a manual pasting (joiner collage style). Ok its not very convincing but it was interesting. The next step was to construct a stitched 350 panorama, but for some reason (not yet understood) it produced a very wavy horizon line. Not to worry, I still had a few more transforms to do. I do have a little utility called Amorph Me! on my portable app key (in my camera bag) which does have something like a polar coordinate style transformation, designed to construct cylindrical mirror transform, sometimes used by M.C.Escher. However this transform needs a more equi-dimensional starting images so I had to stretch my pano out vertically and fill colour the black edges in the original pano. The wavy horizontal produced a nice oval rather than a circle.

 

PhotoProject :: Tiny Watery Planets

Today was a light off-shore breeze and clear sky with an incoming tide late in the afternoon. I knew these where the perfect conditions to get some good images of backlit waves. The conditions where a little overcast so the rich turquoise and blues typical of late summer didn’t happen.  However I took a lot of photos!

Anyway I then had some fun turning them into little planets, polar transformed circular photos. There are a few communities of photo post processors that are dedicated to this round images and some are very precious about what makes a true “tiny planet”, and there are a few good on-line tutorials of how to do it in photoshop, even iphone and android apps, to do the polar transformations. All this doesn’t interest me that much what I wanted to do was emphasis the abstract compositional aspect of circular format. So it was back to basics. I have used a nifty transformation program called anamorph.me before, and it has a suitable polar tranform function, called cylindrical mirror. This is based on a transform that was used my MC Escher, and is designed such that you can put a cylindrical mirror in the center (which is why it asks for a mirror radius) and then when you look at the image reflected in the mirror you will see a normal picture (ok you have to invert it and work out how far around the mirror it needs to be wrapped). To create a full circle I have used 1 pixel as the radius (zero doesn’t work) and wrap (the angular size) the image around 359 digress (it doesn’t take 360 either). This left me was a small white sliver segment, and I used corel-photo paint cloning tool to heal that and also rotate the image into a pleasant compositional position. So here are three tiny watery planets (they will look best a little larger so don’t be afraid to click on them)
  

Transformed

This is a very simple 3 photo panorama, mainly taken of a study of the clouds but I have had some fun using this to test out some of the transformation available in anamorphme