THINGS ARE MOSTLY LOOKING UP. (02/04/13)

I haven’t posted very much over Easter but I have been very, very busy.

For years I’ve played with panoramas. Everything else that took my fancy as well, macro, long lenses, fish eyes, one thing I have learnt is that the lens is king. Good lenses cost a fortune and zoom is a thing I dislike, my legs do the zooming. I only get prime lenses now and am waiting for Canon to admit Zeiss and Scneider do it better. No use pretending a Porsche is a Ford we all know it isn’t.

It  only a laugh the beauty and nasty of digital. One sees what one has without a weeks delay for processing. I was never a black and white person. If I win the lottery I’d love to shoot it digitally on the new Phase One back…Dream on Phase one and even Leica at an tenth the price is far too expensive for me. Digital is getting their. I’m now looking at a new printer I have an old 9000 Canon it’s great to me for A3 and under. I’m not always happy. Paper is a small fortune, I use Perma Jet. I like it.

I realized that wonderful as the wee apps and even the stitcher in PS elements is it distorts the edges of equirectangular panoramas, normal ones to thee and me. I thought before this weekend that it was just the lens. Some of it is so I decided to shoot lots of panoramas and leave a generous fifty percent overlap, crop them square to centre and bang them through the PS Elements 9 algorithm. I didn’t see very much improvement and I haven’t got any control or I have little control so I downloaded HUGIN, it’s free and fine but not user friendly.  Banged a couple of 360x180 25 image sets into it and it was better. I then tried PTGui. A bit easier to use for me as I can drag and drop a series of images in. It is also slightly more intuitive. This is better as it knows when it has fouled up and one is given the images that require manual anchor points adding. I’m not there yet but corner distortion has gone.

I then realized that parallax was causing problems….I always knew it did in the foreground …..I used to just clone the errant bits away . Not the way a purist like what I am is happy with.

I spent an hour or more trying to adjust my Benro gimbal head to act as a panoramic head. I got rid of any sign of parallax at ninety degrees but it reappeared in the second row of images. Bother I said to myself and pointed the camera straight down at the tripod and mount. Could I hell as like adjust it to be pop and over the vertical centre. That’s the problem!… I said….you little tinker you!… Nothing wrong with the Benro head. It does what it says on the box and more. But they are not going to give a tripod head away that does two jobs.

I should get out more!

I have looked all over for a second hand  Spherical Panoramic Head and not surprisingly could not find one I fancied. There are one hell of a lot of bits in these and they require a levelling base. Oh Hum! It’s my Easter egg.

      This one of about two hundred images shot on manual……It’s at the lowest resolution the EOS 5D II can take. I only have 4GB of RAM so have to shoot big images like this or the laptop gives up. I used to be able to give these jobs Scratch Memory but I can’t now. Help Please.

I can see a RAM update for me sometime soon. This modern software is getting very RAM hungry. I suspect that four times as much wouldn’t be over icing the cake. Yet another thing to look into…. I also suspect that with tablets and all that a new laptop will cost twice what it used to ten years ago.Told you I was busy…Busy worrying.

In addition to all  this I had to have a shower and find my posh shoes. I had offered to take the site owners out for a meal…Mike and Carol are brilliant here at Ravenglass and have looked after me as if I were a king. They deserved a treat. A good evening was had by all so it was no hardship for me eating good food and drinking good beer.

Went to bed after walking the dogs…….Woke up and walked the dogs…

No rest for the wicked……Gordon arrived just after breakfast to sort the axles. I only did supervising, my sort of work. He brought an assistant with him so apart from offering helpful advice like push harder I was, thankfully, superfluous.

I went on the train to Millom and got some money to pay him. An uneventful trip and I wasn’t mugged so a good day. The people of Millom must be carrying vestiges of Christian Spirit or the spirits of Easter.

I arrived back to find both axles fitted.

Here they are in all their newness. Brilliant.

The only damper on the weekend was from Bob  BIRDS AND NATURE IN THE FOREST OF DEAN…… His dad died on Saturday  I expect he is hard hit so think of him as I do and wish him well. It’s never easy is death and a family demise can be far worse. All the best Bob and remember it happened in the natural order of life.

Make the best of this week.