Enough with the circling

The police helicopter that has been circling for an hour is driving me crazy. Every night, they circle around in San Jose with their search light. Who are they looking for? I’m sure if they let us know, someone would give them up in order to make the constant “whiiiiiiiirrrrrrr zeeeeeee whuuuuurrrrr” stop. This totally ruins the windows-open-all-the-time spring/summer experience.

How to make amazing panoramas

I’ve had a few questions from various people, and overall my panoramas have been quite popular… so I thought I would write up a few tips, and a kind of short instruction guide. To start with, the hardware and software:

Software — Download autostitch (for Windows), or one of the other software packages including autostitch’s algorithm, such as Calico (for Mac OS X).

Camera — You don’t need anything incredibly fancy, but you do need something that can produce clean, sharp pictures. All of my older panoramas were taken with a 3.2MP Canon PowerShot S230, and my newer ones with a 6.3MP Nikon D100.

Tripod — In order to take good panoramas, you will probably want a tripod. It isn’t completely necessary, but it helps. Keep in mind you will be taking up to 20+ pictures, and you want them to line up as well as possible. A cheap tripod with a built-in level will be fine.

No tripod? — If you want to take a good panorama without a tripod, it’s possible. Hold the camera very steady, and try to move it as little as possible. When you turn to take each shot, turn the camera (as a tripod would) instead of turning your whole body (which swings the camera). This is especially true if you have foreground in your picture which you want to come out nicely.

Settings — For best results, you should consider setting your camera to full manual mode. Manual focus will ensure that you don’t accidentally re-focus between shots. Manual aperture and shutter speed will ensure that each shot is exposed the same as the others, so that there’s less blending work to do for the stitcher.

Orientation — Decide how much vertical space you want; you can shoot either portrait or landscape. I find that portrait shots are best, and give you the most options later. You can always crop out parts you don’t like, but it’s hard to add them in later.

Next, the method for getting the shot:

  1. Find a good view; something with a wide field of view, with nothing significant in the foreground to block the view.
  2. Decide what you want your shot to look like. If you’re on a mountain top, for instance, decide how many degrees to shoot, where to frame interesting objects in the overall panorama, etc.
  3. Decide whether to shoot portrait or landscape.
  4. Set up your tripod. Ensure that it’s level.
  5. Attach the camera and determine how you will move the camera through the entire range you need for the panorama. Look through the lens (or at the display) to be sure that the shot is framed how you want it. Check the camera’s level with the horizon using the built-in marks in the eyepiece.
  6. Take a few test shots, and adjust your exposure and focus. Make sure your test shots include both light and dark areas in your shot.
  7. Frame the first shot. I usually shoot left to right, but it’s up to you.
  8. Take a shot, move the camera a few degrees, but be sure that each consecutive shot overlaps the previous one by a fair bit. I usually aim for about 50% overlap. This gives the stitcher plenty to work with. Continue through all the shots until you reach the opposite side.
  9. Quickly scan through the shots you took, and make sure they all came out alright.
  10. You’re done shooting!

When you get back to a PC, download the contents of the camera, load it into your autostitch, and stitch away. It will normally take up to a few hours to stitch a single shot, but the results are worth it. If you intend to print your panorama (and who doesn’t!) be sure to set the size to 100% and the JPEG quality to 100% before stitching.

When you’re ready to print it, use ezprints “classic site, ideal for professional photographers” to print the panorama. They allow printing of unlimited-length panoramas at 6-inches and 12-inches tall.

Panoramas of the World

When I first got my Canon PowerShot S230, it came with software for stitching panoramas together, made by Canon. The software worked OK for perfectly-shot panoramas, but it didn’t deal well with differing exposure levels, imperfect alignment, etc., and dealt very poorly with bad angles. Nonetheless, I was immediately hooked on making panoramas.

A year ago or so, I found some software called autostitch, which absolutely rules for stitching panoramas together. The downside is, it only runs on Windows. I have a Mac. On Sunday, I went to the autostitch site, and noticed some new links; they’ve licensed their technology to Kekus Digital, who have made Calico … autostitch for Mac OS X! I downloaded it, tried it out, and bought it immediately.

Here are some of the panoramas I’ve stitched together with it:

Note that if you click on the image on the gallery pages, you will get the full size version, some of which are up to 30MB. Enjoy!

rum rum rum DUH

About halfway through my trip camping near Nevada, I noticed my “Check Engine”1 light came on. I also noticed that at idle, the engine was missing occasionally, just idling poorly. I had been buying gas at strange places, so I went through another tank of gas to be sure it wasn’t the gas. It still continued.

I figured it was the spark plugs (they haven’t been changed ever, which is ~77k miles), so when I got home yesterday, I went by Kragen and got a full set of new plugs and the tools to change them. Damn you, crackhead, for stealing my sockets.

I got home and went to work changing them out. The Jeep has an inline 6-cylinder 4.0L engine, so the cylinders are laid out front to back in a straight line. That means that they pass under all kinds of obstacles, and that the back cylinder is really far from the front of the car, just against the firewall2. In addition, they don’t just have the typical spark plug wires connected to each, they have a single long bar that connects to all of them, held on by more bolts that require wrangling to get out. An hour of struggling with a long and short socket wrench, with and without an extension, up to my elbows in engine parts, I finally got them all changed, and got the bar re-attached.

I cleaned everything up, double checked things, and started her up… and hey, it worked! No more misses… I did a full round of about 10 miles on the freeway to get the engine warmed up and running nicely, and re-checked. Still perfect.

1 Actually, it doesn’t say “Check Engine”, it’s a picture of an engine, which doesn’t really look like an engine. When it first came on, I went “what the fuck is that?” I was in 4WD at the time, so my first thought was it was supposed to look like a transmission, so I pulled over and double checked the Jeep’s manual. They should consider updating it to look like an inline-6. :)

2 This makes me appreciative that the Jeep’s hood can be opened all the way back to rest on the windshield, which gives you a lot more elbow and head room while working.

Tent Blogging

In case you needed any more proof of how ubiquitous the internet has become, I’m currently sitting in a tent, many miles up a gravel road1, outside of Reno, Nevada. I’m camping solo, since Adrienne is going to Ohio for a few days.

It’s currently a bit after midnight, and I got the tent set up, got in, and noticed that I have full GSM service (thanks, Cingular!) with EDGE support, even. So I logged on in order to chat and tent blog. :)

1 Note that location, in case I get eaten by a bear…