Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Kuwait, again...

Here I am, back to Kuwait. My sleeping time and habit now is a mess and trying to enjoy as much as I can (with my photos from Ireland) before the beginning of work by November.
I was planning to go to Failaka today, but my sleeping habit isn't helping for now. Today was the perfect time supposedly, as the ferry sets off at 8:00 in the morning, while other days coming after will always be later than this time. The earlier, the merrier. My aim in Failaka is to take a panorama for the inner structure of the bulleted house that I've been visiting every time I go there. I don't know if I can do this before November now, but I need to work more on my sleeping schedule. In fact, I get more excited about my photos and work that I simply forget all about sleeping and stay until the morning, when I sleep usually.

Been working on few images and some panoramas, but the work on one panorama takes such a long time, and almost feels like one day is spent for one specific panorama, so far. One of the first panoramas I started working with for now is the Thornbrook House garden panorama. I'm planning to email the images to my host, Mrs Mary Kennedy.

I did have some hard time working with panorama, as usual, because of unexpected stitching errors. Small in size, but with close inspection they were obvious. Despite the fact that I've used a VR-head here for my camera, but seems there was some shake in the tripod or some rotation in the tripod's plate itself while rotating the VR-head itself, and hence such errors were produced.


The Thornbrook House (B&B) in Cashel town. Spherical Panorama.

The sky was colored with Photo Filter layer in Photoshop. It was grayish and to give it a bit of life, I decided to go and put some bluish hue in it and the scene turned somehow like it is an early morning scene in winter, although the panorama was taken around noon or afternoon of that day.
I've made several sizes of the same panorama for different purposes that might come later. Also, I stitched the panorama all over again, and had so much trouble with memory, this time changing the projection style into my favorite little planet style...


Thornbrook House (B&B). Little Planet projection.

The nadir (bottom) point was not a problem in this panorama, mainly because I picked my location carefully to do this. I picked up a grass land so that mimicking and cloning in Photoshop would be relatively easier and more gradient into the already existing background. Another type of problems occured for me while doing this panorama however, and that is because the PTGui stitcher, was in fact connecting and stitching irrelevant images in the low row of images taken at -45 degrees. This happened because part of the VR-head was apparent in the lens view and at that time I was thinking "not a big deal since we have grass and I can clone it out easily," but the problem proved to be more than that. PTGui started to assign control points from one image to another thinking they are points in the scene itself while the fact it was just my VR-head rotating around itself! The next time I do this, I think I will have to gauge the elevation and limit it to around 30 degrees top and bottom. At the moment though, I don't think this is a good solution. Despite this problem, I did in fact stitch the panorama at the end without doing an optimization for my control points, because every time I do it I get results as "Bad" or "Very Bad" and hence, I decided without optimization, the panorama looks good for the first glance.

Of course that was not enough for me. Still something is missing. QTVR of course! I made two of them, one sizing 4MB in moderately large image and another one sizing around 300kb only with a smaller version, for web purposes.








Along with this panorama, which is the first to achieve so far, I did some simple single images. I might post them at a later time. This time my travel consists of so many panoramas, more than I did take last year in Oughterard, Co. Galway. This means more hard work for now. One of the single images I've processed today was a scene taken from St John The Baptist church, which I visited in my second day in Cashel. The image, although I've saved it and uploaded it that way, is still not what I wanted to achieve by the HDR. I'm reluctant to upload it to stock sites even because I'm almost sure, it will be rejected.


St John The Baptist Catholic Church - Side. Cashel, Co. Tipperary.

Maybe what I like about this image is the crisps that I made in my trial to make it more sharp. Other processes involved here is a fisheye distortion fix, since the image was taken with a fisheye lens, rotation, and chromatic aberrations fix (which was not a perfect fix anyway).

Although I'm still in a vacation, I do feel like something is missing from my life yet. I don't know if this is just an effect of my holiday in Ireland, or it is simply a psychological effect for now repulsing my work start by November, or it means indeed that I'm missing something! I have some books to read still and I have to think of what to do next in my Ayvarith and the project of building a webpage for it. In the same time, I will keep working on my panoramas and images most of my time at home I guess...






No comments:

Post a Comment