“New” Gigapan image
Posted by admin | Filed under Gigapan, History, Images, Regional/Local
Before the weather went north, I got out with the new Gigapan robotic photo mount and took a couple of Great Falls images. Here’s one I particularly enjoy. You can zoom in close enough to see that one of the date plates marking the building’s construction in 1895 is losing its stones. Or you can take a peek at the pigeons on the roof. Gigapans are pretty interesting.
For my own viewing pleasure, I kind of like looking at large city scenes. Since my own photographic interests and abilities are oriented more toward landscapes, I like seeing the different things people are doing elsewhere. And when you zoom in on the detail in a photo of a crowded city, you can see and imagine a great many human stories going on in that image.
All in all, I look forward to warmer weather so I can get out and put this through its landscape paces again. In the meantime, I’ll work on figuring out how to do good indoor gigapans.
Tags: Gigapan, large format image, panorama
New dinosaur image available
Posted by admin | Filed under Dinosaurs, Images
Time to share another released dinosaur stock image…
Tags: dinosaur, extinct, t-rex, tyrannosaurus
We have twitterage
Posted by admin | Filed under Site News
In an attempt to keep up with the technology, I’ve added Twitter tools to the blog. Twitter is a short-message system intended to answer the simple question, “What are you doing right now?” It’s a social media application of the kind often embraced by students and social butterflies, but it’s finding a lot of use among businesses, artists, and politicians. Barack Obama famously used it during his campaign. If I determine that it has value that surpasses the time expense of using it, I’ll begin advising my web clients to introduce it on their websites.
Dinosaurs sighted in the wild
Posted by admin | Filed under Dinosaurs
In stock video and imagery sales, you rarely get to see where your work ends up. Every once in a while, though, a Google search will turn up something interesting. A couple of my dinosaur images have found their way to Smithsonian.com and Science Daily. I’m pleased with the exposure, and now had better go make some more dinosaur images!
Seeing the big picture.
Posted by admin | Filed under Gigapan, Regional/Local
And I mean big.
I recently bought a Gigapan robotic panoramic camera mount. In short, you attach your regular point-and-shoot digital camera to the mount and attach the mount to your tripod. Then you define the upper left and lower right corners of your intended panorama, push a couple more buttons, and the robot automatically pushes the shutter button and advances to the next position. The end result is a similar but more automated process than the handheld process I followed in my description of the large image I took of the Great Falls of the Missouri. My 8 megapixel camera can now produce 1000 megapixel images. When uploaded to the Gigapan gallery (or embedded in blogs like the image below) viewers can zoom in to see, in some cases, an astonishing amount of detail.
Gigapan photos have a number of applications from real estate marketing to 3D imaging, and I’ll be spending a fair amount of time in the next few days and weeks putting the mount through its paces. In the meantime, enjoy my first finished image. Click twice on any area to zoom in for more detail.
Tags: Add new tag, Gigapan, large format image, panorama
Happy Halloween Part 2
Posted by admin | Filed under Animation, Video
I don’t typically enter contests, because I’d rather spend my creative time on pursuits more likely to produce results. It’s the same reason I hardly ever play the lottery. But every once in a while a competition comes along that strikes my fancy and I have to take the plunge. Renderosity, an online art community catering primarily to CG folks, held a Halloween contest that just seemed fun from the moment I heard the title: “Carnival of Evil.”
The contest has concluded, and I am now free to post my project. Please forgive the resolution: because of the time and size constraints imposed by Renderosity, I rendered at a smaller size than I usually do, and you’ll see a bit of distortion. But you should be amused or repelled all the same.
http://www.vimeo.com/2118374And no, I didn’t win.
New Dinosaur Image
Posted by admin | Filed under Dinosaurs, Images
The dinosaur images seem to be selling well in my stock photo ventures, so I’ve decided to add a few more to the market. Here’s the latest completed one:
Happy Halloween
Posted by admin | Filed under Animation, Video
I’ve been busy lately working on Halloween-related animation projects. Here’s a video file to be used in a Pepper’s Ghost illusion at a haunted house in Butte.
http://www.vimeo.com/1922745A Pepper’s Ghost illusion is made by lighting a scene (in this case, an animation) around a corner, then reflecting it onto an angled piece of glass. The resulting image appears to be eerily translucent, and any objects placed behind the class are visible through the ghost. This animation will be visible through a window of the haunted house, and the building next door will be visible through these ghosts.
Fun with Panoramas
Posted by admin | Filed under Animation, Military, Technology, Video
I’ve been experimenting with the Autopano Pro software I mentioned in my last post. In addition to enabling one to stitch several photos together into a many-megapixel image, Autopano Pro can also merge a large group of photos into a spherical panorama which can then be used as an atmospheric backdrop in many 3D applications.
I built a panoramic attachment for my tripod that would mount my camera on its side, then built a guide that would help me line up twelve photos with a 30-degree arc. I imported those images into Autopano Pro, merged them, and exported to my favorite 3D program. Here’s the result of that test, after some fiddling with light settings and virtual camera movements –a pan and zoom video using still photos:
Flying Surprise at Ulm Pishkun from Allan Tooley on Vimeo.
How to go back in time
Posted by admin | Filed under How-to, Images
Here’s a look at the techniques and tools behind one of my more interesting recent images, the Great Falls of the Missouri without Ryan Dam. While I certainly bear no ill will toward PPL, I’ve always wished I could have seen the falls before they were capped by the big hydroelectric project. The Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center has a movie about the Expedition’s portage that includes a quick effects shot of the falls without the dam, and that piqued my interest. So beginning in May, I decided to try my hand at producing a printable image of the Falls sans dam.
It took several trips out to the dam before I got the series of photos I really wanted. My first visit, on Mother’s Day, yielded great weather but no water to speak of. Then we got all that precipitation, but no clear skies for two weeks. Finally, at the very end of May, water and weather cooperated to give me the conditions I desired.
Unfortunately, my camera equipment is relatively low-end and I didn’t have enough of a wide angle option to capture the whole existent waterfall. While I got a great rainbow, I didn’t have much else to work with. Fortunately, though, some software came to my rescue. Using Autopano Pro, I was able to combine several shots into one massive, panoramic image of the falls and the dam. The software effectively turned my 5 megapixel point-and-shooter into a 20-megapixel wide angler. The software isn’t cheap, but it’s quite good. For the more budget-minded, Adobe Photoshop Elements includes a similar feature, but the results weren’t completely to my liking. Here was the result using Autopano Pro:
The black bar in the middle was actually my fault; I failed to take a photo that included that space. I’m still working on a means to ensure that I give my subject proper coverage when making panoramas. Fortunately, that missing space could be filled in using the clone tool in Photoshop.
Now it was time for the real work to begin. I had a good starting image, but too much visible civilization! I needed to create a backdrop to take the place of the dam; the Interpretive Center’s video clip, while inspirational, simply replaced the dam with sky –but if the dam really weren’t there, you’d see the hills of the canyon behind. So I turned to Vue Pro Studio, a fabulous landscape generation software that’s used by film industry professionals to create realistic matte paintings. Here’s my visualization of the area behind the current dam:
All that remained was to combine the images in Photoshop. That’s a little easier said than done, since I needed to “invent” enough waterfall to cover up the hydroelectric plant on the north side of the cascade. After experimenting unfruitfully in a variety of software packages, I decided to take my camera out on another trip or two. I visited the other visible falls that comprise the Great Falls of the Missouri, taking shots from angles that could reasonably be stretched and forced into perspectives that could be used to cover the buildings. Then I brought everything into Photoshop and created about twenty layers of waterfall “pieces,” tweaking and cloning and erasing and smudging until I got the effect I wanted from the water. I also copied and reversed and cloned enough of the nearby terrain to hide the portion of the power plant building that stands out in front of the cliffs on the north side. And voila!
Allan Tooley has over fifteen years of experience in design, publishing, printing, photomanipulation, 3D graphics and video editing. He's been making movies and pictures in his head for much longer, and frequently finds himself waiting for the technology to catch up with his daydreams. When it does, he enjoys putting it to work.