Panoramas

I am fascinated by panoramic photos and produce a lot of them. I’m writing this post to demystify the process and to show you a simple way to get great panoramas on your own.

This pano is of Dana Point Harbor in California.  I created it from these three images

  

Now if you’ve read anything about making panos you’re under the impression that it’s difficult. Advice abounds about using tripods, setting manual exposure, making sure that your overlap xx% for each image and so on and so on. Well all of that used to be true. Panoramic stitching software just wasn’t very good (and most of it still isn’t). Well, forget everything you’ve heard/read about panos.  I’ll tell you the easy way. First set your zoom lens to about 30mm if you have anything but a full frame DSLR (in that case go for about 45-50mm).  Now, shoot a picture to the left, turn a bit so that you overlap about 1/3 of the picture you just shot and shoot another. Keep doing this until you have included all of the scene.

Now, the magic part. Download and install the free Image Composite Editor from Microsoft Research. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ice/

Select your images, drag them into the tool and wait a few seconds for a near perfect panorama. Click on Automatic Crop, then Export to save your new file and you’re done.

Here’s a another example:

               

                               

                                             

                                                          

Notice that I haven’t even done a very good job of having the same amount of overlap each time.  The ICE program comes up looking like this:

And the final result like this:

If you tried to do panoramas before and had trouble, forget all that.  I’ve tried many, many programs that claim to do this panoramic stitching and they all fall short.  Just get this one program and try it; you’ll be glad you did. The program is not perfect. There is a visible seam in the one above.  In several of the ones below there is nothing noticeable at all.

So, that’s it, sweet and simple just as I promised.  Get out there and try it.  And one more thing – you don’t have to do big expansive scenes like these from on high.  Below are some other examples of things you can do.

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Virus problem solved

Yesterday afternoon I got infected with one of those awful fake virus things.  I kept getting popups waning me that my computer was infected and suggesting I buy Antivirus JS for $69.  This was a particularly bad one that prevented most things from running on my computer. I couldn’t even bring up TaskManager to kill it.  Could not run McAfee virus scan or much of anything else.  I rebooted in Safe Mode and ran the virus scanner which took all night (0ver 1 million files).  This morning I rebooted with my fingers crossed and – nada – the infection was still there.

A friend had sent me links to a couple of programs that might remove the infection but I tried those and the virus prevented them from running.  My last hope was to take advantage of a virus removal service that McAfee offers remotely.  But.. I had to get to there web site to order it.  Internet Explorer as compromised by the virus so it would only go to the fake antivirus page.  Google Chrome would not even run.  In desperation I clicked on Firefox and voila I got to the McAfee site.  I had planned to purchase the remote virus removal service via chat but couldn’t find the page that gave that choice so I just clicked on Purchase.  That gave me a phone number to call.  I hooked up with a man named Thomas Abraham, probably in India.  The first few things he asked me to try did not work.  Although we got to the remote access software that he needed to use, my virus would not let that program run.  He had me reboot in Safe Mode with networking and we got him connected.  He took over my computer and, for the next 45 minutes or so, went through dozens and dozens of steps to find and eliminate my infection.  It was fascinating to watch although he was working very fast.  We had terminated our phone conversation; he said we could use chat.  The moment of truth came when he said he was going to reboot the machine in normal mode and I should watch for error messages.  Thankfully I did not see any and waited, holding my breath, to see if the virus would reappear.  It did not! Hoooooray!  He performed another bunch of tasks and then informed me in the chat window that everything was fixed.  I felt like jumping up and clicking my heels.  I am still amazed that they can do that.

39th anniversary

Our 39th anniversary was July 25th.  For my birthday Jill had given me two tickets for a dinner cruise on the Tall Ship Windy for that night.  The kids gave me a gift certificate for a room at the Hyatt for that night. We headed downtown and checked into the Hyatt; they upgraded us to a suite facing the river.

 

We headed down Michigan Avenue hoping to have lunch at the Oak Street Beachstro but the wait was too long.  Tried the Cheesecake Factory in the John Hancock but same story so we ended up at the Mighty Nice Grill in Water Tower Place

We walked around, went over to Rush Street then headed back towards the river.

Went back to our hotel and got ready for dinner

Took the water taxi over to Navy Pier

and headed down to the dock for the Tall Ship Windy.

The cruise was very nice, the food was not so great. We thoroughly enjoyed being out on the lake for the fireworks

Next morning we walked along the river walk but found that none of those restaurants were open for breakfast so we had a nice breakfast at the Great Room in the Renaissance Hotel

Friday July 17th

We had left Friday open to see what people wanted to do.  We had decided to go to the Wild Animal Park.  Unfortunately it was getting pretty hot.  We had breakfast at the Cottage nearby

  and one of the guys there warned that it would be really hot out by the Wild Animal Park.  He suggested we take in the Scripps Aquarium so we decided to start there and see where the day took us.

It was a pretty nice place.

Next stop was the Torrey Pines Glider Port.  Alas, the wind was blowing the wrong way so we didn’t get to see anybody take off

Next stop was Meditation Gardens, again, so that Dave and Jeanne could see it.

After a quick stop at VG Donuts we headed back to the hotel for “free time”. 

We wrapped up a wonderful week with dinner at George’s outdoors high above the cove.  That made 3 of the Ten Best Restaurants with a View in San Diego

Next morning we saw Dave and Jeanne off and then drove the other four to the airport.  We went down to Seaport Village for lunch, dropped off our van and flew home.