It has been a long time since I've made any bread. Too long. For a dinner party this past Sunday, I started back into baking with a couple of focaccia.
The main distinctive factor was that I went out and got a bunch of fresh basil and oregano, steeped them in warm oil, and then used them to top the focaccia. It came out pretty well, although perhaps slightly undercooked.
I've also started a sourdough rye. More on that later.
posted: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 22:36 | permanent link to this entry
The very astute in the audience may have noticed that the panorama I posted last entry is from a newly added shoot. The extra astute who looked at the lens metadata and compared it all all the other lens metadata in my gallery might have divined that I purchased a new lens!
Yes, I am now the proud owner of a Canon EF-S 10-22mm wide angle zoom lens. And, boy is it a wide angle lens. I mean, that is what I bought it for, but wow. Of course, with the 1.6x crop factor, it is the equivalent of a 16--35mm lens, but that is still wide!
I mostly bought the lens for landscapes and like, as my primary lens (the Canon EF 28--135mm) just isn't quite wide enough. Upon reflection, perhaps I would be better served by a decent telephoto lens. But that is probably just buyer's remorse talking. Either way, I'll get a chance to give it a real whirl on an upcoming backpacking trip.
I have noticed the lens has a fair bit of chromatic aberration, especially around the corners. However, this is fairly common in wide angles lenses, so I'm not really surprised. It does make me want to integrate more processing steps into my workflow. But really, I take long enough to go through my photos with only Lightroom (which, by the way, is a fantastic workflow tool), adding more steps is probably not a good idea. I'm really hoping Adobe adds a decent plugin API to Lightroom sometime soon.
As a side note, did you know that the bulk of Lightroom's application logic is in Lua?
posted: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 21:58 | permanent link to this entry
I've always had a thing for panoramas, but whenever I'd tried to find a good toolchain for creating them, I was always disappointed. I mostly used Canon Photostitch, which came with my Elph 230. However, I just took another look at the state of affairs in panorama software, and boy, things have improved drastically!
In the commercial space, I poked at PTGui and Autopano Pro. Both did a pretty reasonable job of things with a couple of test panoramas. PTGui's interface was much simpler, and worked pretty decently, but didn't allow quite the same amount of control as Autopano Pro. Plus, Autopano will take a folder full of images and pick out the panoramas for you!
I did find that Autopano's blending algorithm did not deal well at all with objects that moved in the foreground. It just blends them together, resulting in a horrible blurry mess. You can fix this by saving the results as a multi-layer Photoshop file (a process it makes very easy), the specifically picking from some of the source layers to override the blend layer.
Even more progress has been made in the open source world, however. There is actually a useable open source toolchain now! Not just usable, actually decent! You need three separate programs:
- autopano-sift to automatically line up your images.
- hugin to fine tune the alignment and generate the warped images.
- enblend to blend the warped and placed images.
Of course, this being open source the programs are not really the easiest to use, and require a lot of manual attention to set everything up just right. But the results are great and they even all run under MacOS (with the Mono runtime). Things promise to soon get even better, as hugin/panotools has just received five interns from the Google Summer of Code program.
Enblend does a simply wonderful job. Even with impossible to blend objects in the foreground, it intelligently finds seams and picks one image rather than blending contentious areas. Plus, since the warp and blend steps are separate you can open the intermediate files in the photo editor of your choice and alter the alpha channel to mask out certain areas. This allows you exercise great control over which source image various bits of the panorama come from.
All in all, I'd heartily recommend both Autopano Pro for those who want fairly hands off stitching (and don't mind paying €99) and the open source tools for those who want to exercise OCD-level control over the whole process.
I've only scratched the surface here. There is a ton of good information out there; I found the Panotools wiki to be a great starting point. And of course, the obligatory photo:
posted: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 23:34 | permanent link to this entry
I've spent the weekend hacking on this blog, and I think I'm finally ready to make it public. Not that it wasn't publicly viewable before, but now I'm going to link to it from places and try to post more.
In the process I've learned a lot about pyblosxom and CSS. Overall, I'm pretty happy with pyblosxom, although it does require a certain level of OCD. It gives you the bare minimum rope you might need to implement a blog, and little else. Fortunately, it is very tasteful rope, and many people have contributed modules to do common things (like, say, prev/next buttons for when there are too many articles for one page. Or the 'categories' and 'archives' style navigation on the right. Those are all plugins.)
Of course, I'm still pretty inexperienced at this whole newfangled CSS stuff, so the page probably has lots of problems. If you notice anything, or it just looks crappy in your browser, please do let me know. Here at Nimlabs, Ink., we value your feedback!
posted: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 14:08 | permanent link to this entry
Well, I should expand my blog into photo blogging as well. It seems to be the hip thing to do.
My most recently posted photos are of a trip to Tahoe, CA in Jan 2006. These are, however, quite old photos, and I've gotten better since. Blame Ethan for the long delay. =)
My full photo gallery is of course at
http://www.nimlabs.org/~nim/image/
posted: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 02:56 | permanent link to this entry
