[ravnostic]

Facebook friend queries: ‘For the “congrats your son finally came out of the closet!” line of cards?’

I laughed for 5 minutes. Send THAT to your Southern Baptist friends.

[ravnostic]

Have you tried a different stitcher, or does the canon stitcher have any settings for adjusting light levels during stitching? Yeah, I know… I own a Canon, I should already know that, but the CD has never been removed from the case since I use linux and really didn’t know if the apps would run under wine…

BTW, nice pano… every time I see a beautiful one I want to take a vacation and drive around the SW for a week doing nothing but gathering weeks worth of stitching material. I am so jonesin’ for a road trip.

I get so many more choices out of the Canon software, I haven’t looked elsewise. I could run it through my photoshop program, though, and see what happens.

[ravnostic]

No, stag I wasn’t. I’d like to get one, though; I hear rainbows come out better with them (read that somewhere in here).

[ravnostic]

I can’t tell you anything about the “darker spot” – do you have one of the individual images that I could look at? If it’s consistent from image to image, it can probably be fixed.

It’s consistant; it’s as orioniddescribed, a dropping off of the light toward the right side of the image frame, which shows up in the clouds. I’ll try the additional overlapping; in fact, the first two images where it’s less noticeable were, in fact, closer together.

o, I do everything manually these days except when I don’t have time to fiddle. I’m getting better with my initial settings; a light meter would probably be useful but I can at least look/guess within the ballpark. I did take some vertical pans of this scene. I’m saving those for a panoramic or stitch contest, though. No peekie. 😀

Thanks for the compliments!

[ravnostic]

I went out last week with the intent of getting some photos of the local road crews working.

Never actually saw them doing anything but standing around smoking, though.

Hey, don’t go telling people what other Arizona people will be posting! 😯

It’s all we got, man. 😥

[ravnostic]

Fear of fish? Wuh?

Fear of coming in dead last, I guess.

[ravnostic]

You can get a Tb of plug-and-play backup drive at Fry’s for under $100; I’m very happy with mine.

[ravnostic]

Can the hopper get assigned soon? I think I’m good for Labor Day, I’m avoiding fishes out of fear, and thus I’m looking to know what’s next in line…

purdy please? 😥

[ravnostic]

I like the focal point on #4. My choice would have been a shorter exposure on the first 4, though (really, I’d have popped to 100 and lengthened the exposure. I find color ‘pops’ more when I shoot that way. The tradeoff on lower ISO’s is the longer exposure, though, and on a breezy day that can be a problem, but I don’t think it would have for theses shots.

I love #5 and 6, the colors and lighting and focal points are really good there. 6 over 5, but only because I’m kinda getting big on the ‘rule of thirds’ thing (exceptions or not, it’s a good general rule.)

#7 is a good quality shot, but didn’t excite me as a composition.

#8 is spoiled by the wash-out brightness behind the flower. That can likely be improved post process, though.

#9 is good, but I prefer the lighting in #5-6. Also the green on the left is out of place, 5-6 don’t have that.

#10, however, benefits from that same lighting, by bringing the shadowed leaf into the frame as part of the impact. So far, I like that one best. 11’s good too.

#12 captures the seed filaments very nicely and is also very good.

#13 has beautiful colors (can I hear “Autumn” constest being taken?). But that stray pine needle…grrr. I take stuff all the time in macro and find all sorts of things I don’t see when taking the shot in the pictures. Sometimes they work, most of the time they don’t. 14 has the same problem, but it’s not as distracting with the blur.

Overall, you’re doing very well with the new toy! On macro, you can eek out considerably more DOF with higher f-stops and longer shutter times. Sometimes you’ll want to, others not. Depends of the DOF of the subject. Find a subject with lots of different depths and play with that.

One can never be too rich nor take too many pictures. I’ve learned 1/2 of that by heart, but haven’t won the lotto to test the other part for truth. I’m nearing my 25,000 picture myself, with no regrets at all the ones that aren’t quite ‘there’, for all the few that really are (or at least really close).

Last bit of a suggestion–delete the garbage shots NOW. After 10,000 have been taken, it’s a lot harder to make the time to do so.

[ravnostic]

+1 as they are. A little cropping on the left on the 2nd one, but I think the exposure choices are right for these shots.

[ravnostic]

It’s like you freaks that change your clocks twice a year, the sun is still in the same place, no matter what mechanical games you play! 😛

We Arizonan’s don’t follow that insanity. Just sayin’. We get plenty of daylight and don’t need to economize. 😛

On the vote placement front, changing things would be a disaster of biblical proportions–old testament–real wrath of God stuff–40 years of darkness, the dead rising, cats and dogs, living together…

[ravnostic]

Thanks all, for the input.

I like the color version best. As far as the composition, I like it although it would have been nice to capture it from the other side with the girls faces showing and the wheelchair in the background.

I do, too. And I had some shots where one or more girl is looking back at me, which I thought was better, and where they’ve moved around a bit.

But they had some problems with their swimsuit tops–so I was pretty sure that’s considered child porn in this day and age, and despite my gay factoid, I didn’t feel much like risking jail and such over a better composed picture. So they got deleted. The last thing a gay man wants to go to jail over is picture of a 4 year old girl’s breast.

[ravnostic]

Okay, it’s cool and all, as usual, but I gotta echo the comment in this week’s contest and say

//dude. you. need. a. manicure.

[ravnostic]

orionid wrote:

Correct. By centering the front lens element over the axis of rotation, you can minimize or even eliminate barrel distortion as you rotate the camera for stitched panoramas.

Good to know going into Mtns, Volcanoes, and waterfalls (soon.)

[ravnostic]

Went strolling through my local Home Depot today

You had me at Home Depot.

Is the net benefit of this project to have the lenspiece be centered over the axis of rotation?

And I had to check that my tripod is still here; I have that exact model myself. Pretty good one, for the price.

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