For Tahoe I rented the Canon 70-200 f4L IS. I previously rented the f2.8, but it was really really heavy, so I thought I'd see how I liked the lighter version. It's a great lens for portraits outdoors or in good light, and it is much lighter. Of all the lenses I've rented so far, this is the one I'm closest to buying. But I really can't justify it yet. Ah, the perpetual struggle.

I also got to take a bunch of shot's on Ethan's new camera with his Sigma 30mm f1.4. Not only that, I got to take pictures of the illustrious Mr. Danny! It was really good to see him again, as it had been way way too long. All the photos from that night were taken at ISO 1600 in low light. They are certainly somewhat noisy, but I still maintain that shooting at 1600 is better than getting blurry photos. I think Ethan's sensor might also be slightly lower noise than mine. I've also been toying with the idea of getting a new body, but that I really can't justify.

Continuing a theme of "Ethan's fault," I'm also trying a new challenge: one photo a week. I'd previously tried to do 100 days of photos, but failed at that. One per week sounds much more achievable. Still, I've not been doing a good job. I did a couple today to try to cover for the last few weeks, but really two every two weeks is not the same.

I'm also thinking I should install some new gallery software that other people can upload to. I'm not ready to replace bins for my main gallery, but I'd like to experiment a bit. I might make my one a week challenge photos use something else. And maybe then I'd throw up more random pictures for the blog. We'll see. I still need to upgrade my mailserver, and I've been putting that off for a long time too, so who knows if I'll get to new gallery software any time soon.

Next week I'll be on vacation in Colorado. I'm excited to go for some landscapes again.

As I mentioned earlier, I rented a Canon 70-200 2.8 IS L lens from lensrentals.com for the shoot. On my 1.6x crop camera, the lens was just a bit too long for a lot of the shots, but when it worked, it worked beautifully.

I really liked renting a lens for the shoot. It let me try a lens I otherwise couldn't afford, and as a result I feel I learned a fair bit more from the shoot than I could have otherwise -- not to mention I think the pictures came out well. I've ordered a Canon 17-55 f2.8 IS EF-S for a month, during which I'll be shooting Christmas at Jen's parent's house and another wedding. I'll report back.

The trip itself was excellent. We spent two nights (Friday and Saturday) at the Middle Paradise Valley camp site. The site was quite posh, having a pit toilet and a bear box. A pit toilet may not sound wonderful, but it beats the crap out of digging your own hole each time (no pun intended).

We even managed to get most of the bad luck out of the way in the packing and on the journey there. Due to a small snafu with failing to stop at the last gas station and having to backtrack, we arrived at the staging campground (Sentinal, in Ceder Grove) at 2am Thursday night! But we made up for it by sleeping in on Saturday morning.

The trip had a lot of wildlife. The most exciting wildlife were the completely fearless deer that ran rampant around the campsite. According to the ranger, they were after the salt in our urine. Yum!

I'm really glad I brought my EF-S 10-22. It got a lot of use. I'd considered buying the EF 100-400L for this trip, but decided it was way too expensive and too heavy. Buy ironically, we ran into a crazy old dude who had also schlepped a Canon 20D up a mountain and did have a 100-400L. He let me play it with it. Such a nice lens. I'm so tempted.

I took a lot of panoramas this trip, and my old workflow just wasn't up to it. This time, I assembled and layed-out the panoramas in Autopano Pro, then exported them to Hugin and Enblend for the final warping and blending. This worked fairly well and I'm quite happy with the results.

Also, REI did have an almost exact replacement for my fleece jacket. The only problem with the new one is lack of pit zippers.

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?

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:

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/