Apathetic Thursday

Today begins the internet release the photographic project that I have been working on for the past few months. I will be releasing one set of three photos each day for the next nine days.

I have so much to say about this project that I don’t know where to start. The idea for this project came to me this last fall. There are a several reasons I wanted to do this project. First, I had some really good ideas for neat photos. I could see the images in my mind and wanted to find out if I could capture them with my camera. Another thing that spurred me on was that I wanted to work with models. I don’t usually like taking pictures of people, but I do it from time to time. I wanted to try something where I was specifically shooting people and even more so, posing them and setting up my shot perfectly. Lastly, I really wanted to do some sort of project that involved a tangible outcome. I wanted something to show for my work and I wanted something I could be proud of when I was done.

The original plan was to have one photo from each set, but after my first few photo shoots I realized that I was going to have a terrible time narrowing my favorites down to one photo. I finally caved and decided that three would be a good number of photos for each set. My original list included five different pictures, but the more I thought about it, the more ideas I was able to come up with. It didn’t take long for me to come up with a total of nine sets.

My goal was to make the photos convey a message that could be encapsulated in a single word. Sometimes this required some editing the Photoshop. My Photoshop work was mainly limited to correcting the color, adding saturation, cropping the photo and blurring or darkening the background. Knowing I could always touch things up in Photoshop, I really wanted to try to do as much as I could with just my camera. (For the record, the photos of David jumping are simply layered and made translucent. I didn’t have to move them around.) A few of the photos did require a bit more post editing than the rest though. The Practice series has a funky background which I created and, believe it or not, the Enlightenment series was actually shot in the chapel.

The hardest set of photos to take was the Daydream set. My original concept required a sunny day and a group of people The weather was at odds against me for several weeks. I was almost despairing that the photo would be simply impossible for me to take when two things happened. First I had a whack on the side of the head and came up with a new idea and secondly God gave me the perfect day and perfect timing to grab the necessary photos.

There were aspects of this project that were extremely frustrating and some of the pictures still are not quite perfect. However, I believe I have found a good stopping point, and I am very happy with my final results. The feeling of accomplishment at finally having completed this project is absolutely wonderful. I hope that you enjoy these photos as much as I do.

A lot of time and effort went into this project and there are many people who helped make this project what it is. I would like to thank all my models for being so willing to help me and make time in their busy schedule. I would like to thank Anna for whacking me on the side of the head when it came to the Daydream photos. I need to thank Andy Overn for saving the day and printing out my photos when the original prints didn’t turn out. Lastly, but never least, I want to thank God for giving me the perfect day and the perfect timing to get my final photos taken. Soli Deo Gloria!

I had a chance to take some really neat photos of a few Bald Eagles today, it was really neat to have such a great opportunity presented to me, I was ecstatic. Unfortunately, I feel that the photos I did get to take were not as good as they could have been.

Overall it was a great learning experience and I did get some nice photos. If tomorrow is as nice as today was I may have to venture out again to see who is flying around. We’ll see what the weathers like. For now, feel free to enjoy a few of my eagle photos.

EDIT: I think I’ll probably have a few more eagle photos to put up over the next few days as well, so be sure to check back later. (You really don’t need to know this, but it makes me  feel better when the post is longer than the photo that’s in the post so the layout of my website doesn’t look horrible. Yeah, I know, that’s not a good reason for writing more, but oh well.)

I’m in a picture sharing mood today. I’ll most likely be posting more images sometime tonight. (Got a flower photo shoot this afternoon.)

A few years back I stumbled unknowingly into Panoramic Photography. When I first started stitching images together on my computer I was using Photoshop CS1, and blending the images by hand. (Photoshop CS1 did not to a very good job of merging photos and I didn’t even know that it did that back then.) As I continued to take panoramic photos I started looking into other options. There were several comercially available tools on the market, but I was looking for something free. I found a program called Hugin which ran cross platform and did a pretty good job of stitching photos together.

Hugin allowed for the creation of control points and after setting control points up it would merge and blend the photos nicely for me. The problem was that I had to go through and create the control points by hand. Eventually I was able to get my computer to auto choose control points and merge the photo for me, but because of the buggy nature of Hugin it required me to start in Hugin .7, save the control points and then open the file in Hugin .6 and merge them with that program. This was quite a pain.

When I got my Digital Rebel, it came with software to create panoramic photos. I tested it out, but it had a clunky interface and worked rather slowly so I never really got into using it much.

Then Photoshop CS3 came out. Out of curiosity one day I tested out the Photo Merge tool and was amazed at how well it merged the photos together. It was doing a great job. Whereas CS1 lined the photos up and did a gradient fade between the photos, CS3 actually cut lines along the photos and merged them together. The beauty of this is that the break between photos would usually be at a point where two colors meet and your eye would naturally expect there to be a change in color. This made panoramic making much easier.

It did not make things perfect, though. Photoshop still left me with some color issues and with lines that didn’t quite meet up how I expected them too. So I had to go through some touch-up work when I was done. Which was perfectly fine by me, as long as I didn’t have to spend hours clicking on areas that I wanted to make into control points.

Over the past two years or so I have taken two to three hundred panoramic photos and am slowly working on stitching them together and making them perfect, but even with Photoshop doing most of the work, it’s a long drawn out process.

But then I just ran across a post about DoubleTake. I had never heard about DoubleTake, but it turns out it’s a tool for merging photos to make panoramics. DoubleTake runs for $25 and claims to be a drag and drop perfect panorama tool.

Prompted by curiosity I decided to give DoubleTake and Photoshop a head to head test match.

Before I begin, I have to make a few things clear. Comparing DoubleTake to Photoshop is not a fair comparison. It’s kinda like comparing a cruise ship to a canoe. Sure, they both float and you can ride in either of them but one is bigger and going to do a better job when the seas get rough. The main reason I did this experiment was for fun. There was nothing scientific about this experiment.

For my tests I used my G4 PowerBook computer, with two gig of ram. I used a small little program called “FreezeFrame” to stop all processes on my computer that were not essential so the programs could use as much of my processor as they deemed fit. For each photo I took time measurements with a stop watch and have the image results from both programs. (Although I shrunk them all down for the web.) (As an important side note, when I merged the photos in Photoshop I forgot to merge the layers before I shrunk the photo down to size. As a result there are thin cracks seen along the photos where the images met together. I thought that it might go away when I saved it, but because I didn’t flatten the image first the lines stayed. So the lines are my own fault and not that of Photoshop.) Also, both programs I took “as is” I did not use any advanced techniques to tweak the images, I let the programs to all the work.

I wanted to push both of these programs to their limits, without wasting too much of my time. So the first task I threw at them was a 17 image panoramic photo of Quebec city. I quickly found out that DoubleTake only merges photos horizontally or vertically, not both. DoubleTake finished the task in 46 seconds but produced in image that looked like this:

Photoshop on the other hand, took a whopping 34 minutes and 45 seconds to churn away at the image but produced a more accurate result like so:

I figured I best stick to only horizontal images for my next tests and decided that I would take a smaller 5 photo image. DoubleTake zipped through this image in 19 seconds. However, it didn’t like the overlap of the photo and gave me a duplicate mountain:

Photoshop took 3 minutes and 48 seconds to produce a more accurate photo as such:

My next task for them included a photo of 8 images where the exposure changed from image to image. I wanted to see if DoubleTake recognized this on it’s own and tried to fix it. Sadly, it did not. In 35 seconds it cranked out this image:

Photoshop noticed the issue and 5 minutes and 32 seconds later it came up with this for a solution:

At this point I felt that I needed to give DoubleTake a fair chance. DoubleTake’s target market is not for professional or semi-professional photographers who take panoramics for a living. It’s a consumer grade product, wonderfully priced and very easy to use. It’s for the casual person who every now and then has a photograph or two that they need to merge to make a bigger picture. So I grabbed what I called a “neat” panoramic photo.

Two images, side by side of a sunset. Good overlap, not much movement in camera, color and exposure good throughout. Overjoyed with the opportunity, DoubleTake jumped right in and 5 seconds later it had created a nice little photo like this:

Photoshop took 39 seconds to create this image:

If I were to crop these last two and put them side by side, I probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

Now, only after all of this, I went and looked at the interface and options that DoubleTake has to offer. Unfortunately, DoubleTake’s method of merging the photos is a gradient blend, which isn’t bad if things are lined up nicely, but what will sometimes happen is that things won’t be lined up nicely and there will be half faded ghost-like items in the image. You can control where the gradient is though, and the extra control can be very helpful. Also, there are options to adjust the exposure and color on each individual image, so if one photo is over exposed, it can easily be fixed and the panoramic can be saved.

The interface allows for a few other options on setting the geometry, lens focal length and all that fun stuff, which makes this a very useful tool if you just want to make some simple panoramics from time to time.

For people who don’t have access to Photoshop, this is probably a pretty good deal. It’s cheaper then other blending programs (that I know of) and it’s very easy to use. For those who have Photoshop or at least have access to it, it does a better job at blending in tough situations but there is a performance penalty when it comes to time.

Neither program is absolutely perfect, Photoshop has trouble when it tries to line up the water going over the falls at Niagra, if you didn’t notice the big jump on the horizon scroll up and give it a look. It would definitely need some touch up.

I can’t say that one program is “better” then the other simply because these are two completely different programs targeted towards two completely different groups of people. However, if you are planning on doing panoramics on a large scale, Photoshop is probably the way to go. Otherwise, DoubleTake does a pretty good job.

I like taking pictures. Too much so. I got my first digital camera in early 2004 and quickly took 1000+ or so photos over the next two years. (I think the actual number is a lot higher, but I can’t be sure anymore.) In 2006 I took 4000 photos and got my first DSLR camera. And in the following 12 months I took roughly 10000 photos.

This left me with about 18000 that were sitting on my computer, largely unsorted and sitting in iPhoto. I did do some work with my photos, but I never deleted any. I have hundreds of bad photos, some a blurry, many have poor composition and I find that there are far too many duplicates.

I needed to organize these photos. I needed to throw out the bad ones. I wanted to go through these photos, one by one, and save the good ones, getting rid of the bad ones, touching up the ones that needed to be touched up.

I had some options. All my photos were in iPhoto, I could take them all, tag them, rate them and set up smart albums and regular albums for them all. I had tried that a bit in the past from time to time and it never seemed worth my time. It was too clunky. It didn’t flow well and I had no starting place. Also, I was never quite sure if iPhoto really deleted my photo or not. Often I would delete a photo from an album only to remember that it was still present in my library. This was not a good solution.

I looked around for other programs that might do the job, but I never found anything that was quite to my satisfaction. So I had one option left: make my own.

So I began to think about the best way to go through and organize pictures. I didn’t want some proprietary format that I would have to keep buying upgrades for as my collection of photos increased or as time went on and it was upgraded. I also wanted to sort my photos by a single keyword, a simple dialog box which asked me for a name and then I could move on to the next photo.

I’m a fan of Applescript, which for those who don’t know is a easy to write programing language made by Apple which works with “many” of their programs. I know some other languages, but I don’t know enough about attaching them to interfaces and I didn’t want to take the time to learn, I just wanted to sort my photos.

My final solution turned out pretty well. I take all the photos I want sorted and dump them in an arbitrary folder. (The folder can’t contain other folders, but I’m still tweaking the code to fix these things.) Then I run my Applescript. It asks me to locate the folder of photos to be sorted and to locate a folder to sort the photos into. (I set up a folder called “Philip’s Photo Library” and sort them in there.) The program then runs through all the photos in the folder of unsorted photos, (opening them in Safari since Preview is not Applescript friendly) and then asks me to type in a name or category for the photo.

This is where things get a little tricky. If the photo I am looking at is a flower, not only do I want the program to move the photo to a folder called “Flower” but I probably also want to change the name of the photo to “Orchid” or whatever flower it happens to be. Whereas if the photo is some random photo from the family reunion I want the program to move the photo into a folder called “Family Reunion” and I don’t really care to name the image file.

To solve this I decided to have two options on my dialog box, one called “Name Image” and the other “Next Please”. If I choose “Name Image” I am presented with a second dialog box to change the image name and if I choose “Next Please” I just move onto the next photo and the picture file is automatically named from the first dialog box.

One of the first things I knew I needed to protect against was duplicate names. (I was fixing this before I had the two dialog box system as described above.) So I had the script count the number of photos already in the folder it was going to put the next picture, add one to the count and then put that number at the end of the name. When I added the second dialog box, I wondered if I should tweak this, since it wasn’t entirely necessary, (maybe use a different command, such as “move without replacing” or something) but I decided that my solution already worked and an arbitrary number at the end of the image name was no big problem to deal with. It would be fairly easy to get rid of later if I wanted too.

Right now I have used my script to sort through almost 1000 photos, I have deleted about 400 of the bad ones, and I now have roughly 10000 left to go through. I feel like this is finally under control. (Or at least able to get under control.)

My next issue is tackling my work flow for working with RAW format photos. I have started taking photos with RAW format which means they need to be processed before most applications can use them. They are also a lot larger in size. So I can’t let them accumulate because I will run out of hard drive space.

Also I need to start up my panoramic work again. A good 3000 of my photos are all for panoramic work. I have 100+ panoramic that I need to splice together. I’m just glad I have tools to help me do that.

Finally, though, I am working on cleaning up and debugging my applescript code so that it is more robust, then I plan to post it up to my website in case anyone else would be interested in this type of photo sorting solution. In the long run I think it would be nice to add an interface to the app, simply because the dialog box always pops up in front of the photo I am trying to look at, but also because I don’t want it to have to rely on Safari. If anyone would be interested in the code, let me know an I can post it up. It’s not as robust as I would like yet, but I’m willing to let it be open sourced. (I should really clean up my Applescript first though.)

Have a happy new year and may your photos all be sorted this year.

Well I just uploaded a whole bunch of Photos to Flickr today and ran into the “You have more than 200 Photos” issue. I didn’t realize this, but if you have more then 200 photos on Flickr, you can only see the latest 200 of them. Which, for me, defeats the purpose of putting photos online, especially if I am going to be linking to them from other websites. This means that my photo could disappear from a website because it is no longer visible on Flickr.

So I bit the bullet and purchased a Flickr Pro account. I’m already paying Yahoo to access my email via POP3 access, I figure what’s another $25 a year if I can get some more attention as a photographer.

Really, to me, Flickr is all about exposure. I have 18000+ photos sitting on my computer that I don’t even have time to look at. Some of them are really good photos. A few thousand are probably waiting to be deleted, if I ever found time to sit down and sort them. But when I find good ones, I want to be able to share them with other people. If I make greeting cards out of them,  I want to have people know that they are out there and available for purchase. My website readership is admittedly low, so gaining all the attention I can will require an outside source of traffic.

Anyway, now that I am actually paying for service I’ll probably be using it a bunch more, so be ready for more photography posts on my part.

I love panoramic photos. Actually, I love big panoramic photos. Really, really big panoramic photos. Man, I just can’t get enough of them! The problem is, I don’t have the funds to print them. Here’s my latest creation, just under 3 feet tall, and just over 12 feet long. I tell you, the only thing better than having this baby hanging on your wall, is having this as your actual window view. I just can’t wait to have it printed. Here’s a thumbnail for you. It’s not nearly as impressive, but it’ll give you a small glimpse of what I have. (If you’re interested in pre-ordering a print, drop me a line, I’ll work out the printing price for you.)

This photo is overlooking the newer part of Quebec City in Canada. I captured it in March of 2007, it is a compilation of 4 photographs.

(Oh, by the by, the colors much better in person as well.)