Gigapan is a website which displays super high resolution panoramic images, acquired by a special panoramic camera rig. Today, I got a note from Ed Haas, mechanical tinkerer extraordinaire, that his workshop had been imaged. Check out the 1.7 gigapixel image (be sure to pan in and read some of the labels on things on the shelf. Very cool.
gigapan: Steamboat Ed’s Shop - Detail of Lathe (steamboat_ed_07)
Stumbleupon sent me to this incredible nighttime panorama of Paris taken somewhere near Notre Dame (you can see the big rosette window in one part), but includes views of the Seine, the Eiffel Tower, St. Eustace, St. Michelle, Sacre Couer in the distance, and the Louvre. Very nice. If you click here, you can see a slightly lower res version of the same panorama in a viewer that will allow you to scroll left and right.
Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble is apparently over in Paris, and decided to blog about the stuff he did in Paris, of which he only thought the Musee D’Orsay sufficiently interesting to mention, probably because their IT system apparently runs Windows XP.
Get some soul, man.
When Carmen and I went there for our anniversary back in 2003, we spent the entire day in the Musee D’Orsay, and at no time did we even think to ask what operating system their IT system runs. It just never came up.
Here is a by-no-means-comprehensive list of some of the things that this geek did while in Paris:
That was the first day and a half. We were there for a week. We saw the Louvre, including an exhibit on Michaelangelo and Da Vinci. We killed a day at the Musee D’Orsay, skipping their IT department, but did stop to have lunch in their “cafeteria”. We had dinner at Gourmard, the second most expensive restaurant I’ve ever been to, and worth every penny. We took an early morning train to Versaille, where we snapped some fun pics of us in the Hall of Mirrors. We fed birds that flocked to our table in Montmartre as we ate escargot, just because hell, we were in Paris. We went to the Paris airshow, walked around the Fete de la Musique, scaled the Eiffel Tower at sunset, took boatrides on the Seine, took pictures of Notre Dame, Sacre Couer, and other lesser known places. We visited Les Jardins de Luxembourg, and just basked in the late sun. We mastered the Paris Metro, and just all in all had a blast.
Didn’t really think much about blogging.
Sometimes, you just have to unplug, at least, until you get back and post all the pictures to make other people jealous.
That’s what this geek did in Paris. I’d love to go back.
This is kind of a crazy Rube Goldberg project for budding videographers: a scheme for creating depth of field using 35mm lenses. Most digital video cameras have very limited depth of field because of their relatively small optics and imagers. So what’s a person to do? Well, basically create a telecine like setup that uses a conventional 35mm lens which casts an image onto a ground glass screen, and then use the DV cam to video that directly with a macro lens. The ground glass in this setup is actually implemented using one of those plastic spacer cds and an old CD player (the moving screen hides scratches and blems in the “ground glass”). Kind of a neat project.
Pixarian and Pentax camera user Juan Buhler sent out an email proclaiming that “Canons are great” linked to this rather expensive coffee table. Heh.
Josh over at tinyscreenfuls.com was off at the Portable Media Expo, and posted his photos on Flickr. Does anyone else’s mind go straight to the gutter in reading about this device?
If not, try saying it aloud in your company lunchroom.
In an earlier post, I pointed at fellow Pixarian Juan Buhler’s awesome photography blog. Unfortunately, I missed our photoclub meeting, but he sent out mail indicating that he uses some of the techniques listed in Digital Black and White to get his spectactular street photos. I’ve actually seen this page before, (thought I might have even blogged it), but haven’t worked on creating the appropriate workflow for Gimp (I’m too cheap to buy Photoshop, and just honest enough not to pirate it :-).
Juan Buhler has just joined the staff here at Pixar, and is one of those insanely talented photographer types who has a much cooler blog than me. Damn them all to hell! 
He also knows a thing or two about computer graphics, and was the Sketches Jury chairman for SIGGRAPH last year. Welcome aboard, Juan.
Why do all my pictures look like bad security cam footage?
My brother-in-law is in Alabama helping out kidney dialysis patients. He sent my sister this photo, which she notes:
This was taken in alabama, Dave said that the concrete that is buckled was by the force of the water.
- kris
Ugly.
While browsing the photo and print collection at the Library of Congress, I found this really cool photo of a telescope set up in New York City. I wish they had a higher resolution version: it’s very cool.
You can find all sorts of cool stuff in the Library of Congress print collection, much of it public domain.
Dan has put up a nice photo of a butterfly that he took while zipping around China Grove Camp. Now that my weekend chore is completed (painting my garage) maybe I’ll try to go out for an evening walk and do the same, maybe with my new video camera.
Well, after I crossed the finish line of the Bay To Breakers yesterday, I snapped the picture on the right. It seems that exercise can cause hideous genetic mutations.
Well, no. Actually, it shows that my camera phone is a line transfer rather than a frame transfer ccd device: it scans the image out as it is taking it, rather than taking it all at once and then clocking the stored frame out line by line. This means that camera motion can cause bizarre distortions of the resulting image, resulting in the kind of cool picture on the right.
I think I’ll use it in my sidebar, and link it back to this posting just for fun.
I had dinner tonight with fellow SIGGRAPH sketch jury member Kevin Bjorke, whom I found out is the brains behind PhotoPermit.Org, a website that tries to shine the light of justice onto inappropriate police actions taken against photographers. Many police officers seem to be unaware of the rights of individuals to photograph public spaces. From their site:
Have you been hassled while trying to make what you thought was an innocuous photograph or video? Have you been threatened? Have security guards demanded that you hand over your film, memory cards, and/or camera? Perhaps snatched them from you? Then PhotoPermit.Org is intended for you.
Have you been successful in convincing irate parents, confused rent-a-cops, and troublesome self-appointed “authorities” to let you go on with your own perfectly legal work in peace? Then this site is especially intended for you, to share your methods and success in making the world a more free one. No one has ever demonstrated that an ignorant society is a safer one.
Have you been one of millions of honest, non-threatening photographers who are anxious about visiting the streets of their own cities, national parks, or public landmarks for fear they will be targeted by overzealous authorities? Then PhotoPermit is here to help you be you sure and comfortable in your rights and responsibilities.
Awesome. I’ve bitched about this issue before, it’s good to see someone has provided this useful resource to help inform and protect the legal actions of people against abuses of authority.
Courtesy of the the Make magazine blog, here is the instructions for Dirkon - The Paper Camera [pinhole.cz], a pinhole camera design first published a Czech magazine in the 1970s.
