The incredibly useful dpreview.com has an announcement for a new release of the image noise reduction program Neat Image. If you’ve got photos which are grainy because you are pushing your camera to the limits of its ISO setting, try putting Neat Image to work on it. I’ve blogged about it before, it’s very cool, and worth the money.
Category Archives: My Photos
More fun with reflecting balls
After yesterday’s post, I decided that I’d like to try to make some better reflection maps. So I shot this image of my office reflecting in a Christmas tree ball. The image is pretty noisy because my office isn’t brightly lit. (Addendum: I also had the camera set for outdoor white balance, which makes the overall image look pretty crufty. I just shot a different image, and got this better image, which has a magenta hue, but isn’t yellow orange at least.) I then cropped it to a square containing just the ball, and passed it through my unwarping program:
I have a different version of my program that produces a cube map, which is perhaps more intelligible (click on it for a bigger version):
It appears that the quality is pretty much limited by the poor surface of the reflecting ball. You can see a lump in the ball causes the book in the foreground to have a distorted outline.
Still, fun stuff.
Cool video experiment
Video Thing has a cool experiment in shooting panoramic video using a Christmas tree ball mounted on a boom in front of a DV cam. An After Effects plugin turns the resulting reflection into a cylindrical environment video. Very cool.
I did some experiments a while ago using this setup, only with still images instead of video. My old Kodak 210+ wouldn’t focus close enough to get a good image of the ball, so I turned out this:
The code was pretty simple to write: just convert from reflected rayspace into a cylindrical map. Cool stuff.
Weekend Pic
Carmen and I spent a short weekend at Reno/Tahoe, and I snapped this picture of her at the shore of Lake Tahoe. A nice trip, alas, all to short. Love you honey! Every moment with you is a vacation all by itself.
Picture seems overblown because I used my cameraphone, and let’s face it, it’s not the greatest camera.
Pinhole photography
The article on the Dirkon Paper Camera reminded me of the couple of pinhole photographs I made using a simple cylinder of cardboard and some photographic paper.
Robogames 2005
Well, just got back from a day of watching robot combat at the Robogames competition in at San Francisco State. It continues tomorrow. You can look at my gallery of photos, and maybe even watch a Quicktime of a poor Robosapien competing in an event.