Sunday, July 31, 2011

Staups Mill, Jumble Hole Clough: Charlestown

Jumble Hole clough is a narrow steep sided valley with a small stream running into the river Calder. In the 18th and earth 19th century the valley was an industrial centre with containing a number of mills and housing.

The large wall visible in the panorama is the remains of Staups mill. This was a water powered cotton mill fed from a dam higher upstream.

More information about Jumble Hole Clough and the remains of industry in this area can be found here


Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Colden Clough, Hebden Bridge: Aliens and robots

a sculpture trail in Colden Clough created by the children of Hebden Royd C.E Primary School. There till September. Details at http://www.hebdenbridge.co.uk/news/2011/122.html for anybody who is interested.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Tips on capturing a 360° panorama using Photosynth and Microsoft ICE

Capturing a panorama:


If you are not using a tripod: Pick a spot and rotate ‘round’ the camera as if it (not you) is fixed to a point on the ground. I have found that taking photos in vertical sequence, working from top to bottom to top seems to work best. Go for an overlap of around 75°. When you have taken the first vertical sequence return to the bottom (as near to your feet as possible) and moving about 25% of an image to the left/right for the next vertical ‘strip’. When this has been repeated for the entire scene, step back and capture the area which was underneath the camera by moving around the area taking several photos.

If you are using a tripod the same procedure will work although you may have to remove the camera from the tripod to photograph the last few ground images.

Optimal number of Photos:

For a 360° x 180° panorama anything around 300 seems to work best, anything over this requires a lot of processing time and physical memory on your PC.

Tips for capturing an outdoor panorama successfully:

  • Keep the camera relatively level, some users have reported that a small spirit level fixed to the base of the camera can produce better results with ICE and Photosynth.
  • If you plan on having the sun in shot try to capture the area around it first, it moves!
  • Dense occluded areas such as leaves and small branches can be problematic, try taking more photos for these areas.
  • If the scene you are capturing has people in it make a note of areas where people are moving around. Go back at the end and re-photograph these areas later. Discard the shots containing partial images of moving people before processing
  • Large plain angular surface do not work well, picking a time with carrying shade and more shadows can help
Post processing:

It is possible to export you panorama as an image and then process/tidy up in Photoshop. To do this you will need the Photoshop export plugin from Microsoft research (available here). When you have copied this into your import/export plugins folder is will allow you to export your image directly to the Photosynth site. Please note that you should crop and resize your image from within ICE ans doing this in Photoshop will produce very strange results or refuse to work.

Hebden Bridge 'Marina'

Monday, July 18, 2011

Gloucester Cathedral: East window

Megapixel composite image of the large stained east glass window. The east window of Gloucester Cathedral dates from the 1350s, the quire of the church was extended outwards to accommodate it and was the largest window in the world at that time.  More details on the figures can be found at: http://www2.glos.ac.uk/bgas/tbgas/v044/bg044293.pdf . The Gloucester cathedral website also has a detailed description of some of the main figures in the window.

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