Polar Seattle

I had some fun making this picture of Seattle’s water front, as seen from West Seattle, thanks to Dirk’s article on Photojojo. It was pretty easy using ICE and Photoshop…

 

Here’s the steps:

1. Take some pictures. For this I used a set of snaps of the downtown Seattle skyline from across the bay in West Seattle.
   
   
   
2. Stitch them together to build the panorama. For this I used the Image Composite Editor (ICE) from Microsoft Research
   
   
   
   Which resulted in a rather large TIFF file – 24,101 x 2890 pixels. But only because I was being excessive…
   
3. Clean up in Photoshop by cloning the sky and cropping out the water to compensate for the poor job I did aligning successive frames when taking the pictures (note to self, next time use a tripod or find a flat surface to rest the camera on)
   
   
   
4. Compensate for the change in cloud cover because if we just wrap the scene difference in cloud density and texture from left to right results in a noticeable join. To compensate I masked out the buildings; grabbed some cloud from the left; flipped and stretch and placed behind the buildings on the right; then used a gradient mask to blend into the original sky.
   Here’s the sky at the right end of the panorama before (left) and after (right) the compensation:
   
     
   
5. Convert to polar coordinates by
1. first resizing to a square image (Image | Resize… ensuring constrain proportions is off)
2. flipping vertically
3. and then using the Polar filter (Filter | Distort | Polar Coordinates…) to convert to polar coordinates and get the wrapped circular effect
   
6. Tweak using the imaging tool of your choice.
   

Enjoy.

New York on 9/11 from the air

On NPRs The Picture Show blog.

Wobbly Flickr with IE8?

Is it just me or is flickr wobbly with IE8…

Following #photo in the Twitterverse

Stumbling across interesting things that you wouldn’t have gone looking for can be fun, but time consuming. Recently, in an attempt to cut out the time consuming bit, I’ve had a Seesmic Look session running in the background. Look is an interesting take on Twitter; no need for an account and channels (apparently sponsored in many cases) to help you find stuff without resorting to # and @.

Here’s a snapshot of the Kodak Photography channel in ‘playback’ mode. I think this is how I stumbled on the Daily Shoot...

Practice with the Daily Shoot

Practice makes perfect someone once said.

One of the tricks to improving at photography is to practice capturing images that convey something that someone else set the brief for.

The daily shoot does just that. Follow @dailyshoot on twitter; you’ll get a new brief | assignment | challenge each day, take a picture and then post a link.

The humble effort above is for assignment 77, wherever there’s an edge, and is a partial reflection of Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear.

Thank you James and Mike for executing on such a great idea.

Sure, of course I can do an album cover

I’m glad it was chucking it down with rain this morning. Instead of the bike or bus I drove and had NPR/KUOW for company. Marcie Sillman interviewed Jini Dellaccio: musician, graphic designer and photographer.

Proof that news doesn’t, nor shouldn’t, be angst-inducing or depressing. Feeling good & inspired and it’s only just gone 7…

Not enough Disk Space

After backing up the catalog, Lightroom helpfully informed me of low space on the C: drive. This is what Explorer thought of the situation:

Or, in command prompt-speak:

Lightroom quirk or Windows quirk?

McCullin

The BBC has an audio slideshow with Don McCullin talking about some of the photographs he’s taken. Part of the ‘Shaped by War’ exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. More in the Image Gallery.