timeimmortal

Here’s another panoramic from the dockyards near downtown Vancouver.

As usual, this shot was composed with Hugin, and as usual Hugin’s performance was pretty good; I can see a couple small disjoints in this image, but for the most part it is a smooth composition, and I’m happy about that.

Per how I usually handle panoramics, I started by matching the exposures on each of the seven shots comprising this image in Lightroom. I also applied a fairly standard set of presets concerning sharpening, colour calibration, chromatic aberration reduction, and noise reduction. I also tweaked the highlights a little bit, and then exported all the pictures as TIFF files.

The final product out of Hugin was a large image over sixteen thousand pixels wide, which Lightroom wouldn’t have supported but which Lightroom 2 handles just fine; I straightened and cropped it somewhat, brightened everything a little bit, and then exported the final product.

Update: Welcome, Steynians! And don’t worry — I harbour no nefarious intent in taking pictures of the dockyards here. And to be sure, nobody around the area walked over to interdict me in my photo-taking spree, and I was there for a good half hour or so.

Which is not to say that I haven’t been interdicted before, of course; while in England, I was taking pictures of the trains there, and was asked to delete the photos from the camera by a concerned security guard. The lesson that I took away from that, however, was that security guards don’t understand digital cameras all that well. After deleting the offending photos, I switched memory cards in my EOS 350D, pocketing the old card and not using it again until I got home. Once I got back to my office, I ran an “undelete” utility on the card and recovered the missing photos.

Learn the technology, people! Learn it well, because I’m not the only guy who knows how to do data recovery on a memory card. And while my intentions are good — I just like taking pictures a) because a particular scene looks pretty/interesting to me, or b) so that I can have visual catalysts for good memories — not everyone who knows how to use data recovery software has similarly good intentions.

~ by Kenneth on April 19, 2008.