As promised, some pictures from the butterflies' winter home in Santa Cruz. These give some sense of how many butterflies there were (although I'm told that it's nowhere near what it once was):

And a few pictures of the stars of the show:

Sadly, my camera was really not up to the task in terms of zoom; these only look like it was due to heavy cropping. Laura and I spent a lot of time looking enviously at other visitors with much more substantial lenses—in fact, Laura is looking at telephoto lenses for her digital Rebel as I write this, so maybe next year's crop of photos will be even better.

(Yes, the title is terrible. It's my weblog, and I'll do as I please.)

Category: Photos

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Okay, so I missed my post for yesterday. But Sunday morning is a lot like Saturday night, right?

Anyway, I have an excuse: I was playing with hugin. It's an automagic panorama creation tool—you drop in some pictures, feed it lens information, define control points in pairs of images that correspond to the same point in reality, optionally tweak some parameters I don't understand yet, and poof! Instant panorama. It does all the necessary warping of the images to remove perspective effects and minimize barrel distortion, while keeping the horizon level, then positions them correctly and does some edge blurring to remove harsh lines.

It's not perfect; the OS X port still has some roughness to the UI, and it doesn't (as I was hoping it would) automatically do color level adjustments of the pictures to match the colors at the control points in order to prevent sudden color variation across the final image. On the other hand, setting the control points is surprisingly painless, and it's pretty impressive to see how quickly it figures everything out. It's certainly unbelievably easy compared to doing everything myself in the Gimp, and does a lot more actual distorting rather than relying on meticulous airbrushing to fake it. And as an added bonus, there's actually a step where I have all the distorted and positioned images as separate files; it would be easy for me to inject some manual color adjustments at that point, or even to to my own custom fuzzing and stitching if there are any details I want to get just right.

All in all, I rate it extremely cool. Stay tuned for a sample panorama or two.

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And speaking of photography: Chapter 2 in the story of my camera exploration, this time playing for the first time with night photography (in the park next to our apartment). I picked up a light-weight tripod when I got the camera, but hadn't yet played with it much. Nothing particularly inspired came of the outing, although I did especially like how the flag turned out.

I was surprised at how easy it was to recover the true colors out of the pictures, despite the low light. After consider, though, I find I do prefer the mood of the pictures as they came off the camera (except for the flag, where the originally simply looked muddy).

I may play with altering the color balance only in the sky, as the red of the sky is very striking, especially in the first scene, but is almost entirely lost in the un-retouched version.

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The winner of my camera run-off, after much reading, playing with cameras, and pondering, was the Olympus C-7000. What with the craziness of work, I haven't had too much time to play with it, but this morning a leaf on our patio/deck/porch caught my eye. All but one other leaf I could see were wet in a vague, glossy-sheen sort of way, but this one leaf was instead studded with individial water drops. Since one of the things that swayed me toward the Olympus was the 5x optical zoom and super-macro shooting mode (as close as 2cm), this leaf called out to me as a perfect zoom test subject.

And so, in celebration of my camera, I am opening a new “Photos” section with a few leaf pictures. The large versions have been scaled down significantly; the original files are over three times the size (in each direction). 7 mega-pixels is a lot of pixels!

First, the secondary droplet-covered leaf. Not so interesting as a picture as the one that caught my attention, but it gives the context for the detail veiw (which shows the full resolution of the camera).

I love the full view of the sky and trees overhead in the drop. The hardest part of taking this picture was making sure I didn't actually hit the leaf with my lens, I was so close.

Then a shot I like since it captures a bit of the feeling I got when I first glanced outside and the leaf jumped out at me. It's great fun to play with the photos afterwards, which is what I love most about digital photography. One press of a button gives me a sepia view, which I really like for the way it brings out the brightness of the water drops. Then I just had fun with the image for a few minutes, and created a version which is completely different from what was actually there, but says a lot about the way I saw the leaf.

The hardest part here was the angle; the LCD screen came in extremely handy as I don't think I could have gotten my head low enough to frame the shot the way I wanted if I'd needed to use the viewfinder, and as it was I still needed to crop slightly to get the frame right (another reason to love digital!).

Hopefully this section will grow as I have time to take my camera exploring.

Category: Photos

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