Category: photos

Posted on

photography: geotagging, stitching & Google Earth

Mount Eagle panorama southeast

OK so I’ve discovered geotagging for flickr images, which allows you to pinpoint where on the planet your photo was taken. This may not be particularly useful for abstract images, but is very useful if you have a particular interest in a place. I’ve also started to use stitching software to join up multiple images into one seamless panorama, so it seems that geotagging, stitching and flying to these locations (using RobRoys excellent flickrfly coding) withGoogle Earth could be fun, and almost in the spirit of Web 2.0 whatever that may me. So here, for the moment is a panorama taken from Mount Eagle, the most westerly place in Europe. I took the sequence of shots in October ’04, but it has taken till now to offer this up. Enjoy flying there in Google Earth, however the satellite imagery isn’t great (yet) for that part of the world.

Don’t be put off by the small image size above, if you click the image, you’ll be taken to flickr where you can see it in all its glory.

Posted on

editing: visualizations

Most of the new work we’ve been getting recently has been in the area of 3D visualizations for developers, architects, city planners and the like. What we’re trying to do is integrate 3D modelling with “real” footage of the locations and attempt to marry the two types of images in a refreshing way.

The visualizations help investors, planners, architects etc get a better sense of what a building might be like (if it was built). For the City Planner in Dublin City Council, we’ve been doing some visualizations of new streets they’re planning on creating in various parts of Dublin City Centre. Unfortunately I can’t show any of the visualizations just yet for copyright reasons. They will be in the public domain soon enough though.

To this end, I’ve been out filming in Dublin, places I’ve never been before, on top of buildings mostly to get interesting angles of places I’ve taken for granted most of my life.

 

 

Berry Bros & Rudd

 

The view from the top of the Savoy Cinema is spectacular, along O’Connell St down towards the bridge. A sniper’s paradise for sure, but I guess the Feds know about that.

 

 

gullible

Posted on

Ben can’t stand still

I’ve been experimenting with my tiny, portable tripod (folds up into a pocket) and some night photography recently. Here is Ben half way down the East Pier in Dun Laoghaire. It was a cold, blustery evening and a six second exposure for a six-year-old child is a long time. I’m pleased with the results though, there’s a few images in flickr in this series. This was taken with the Digital IXUS 500, but I’d love (to be able to afford) the control of a dSLR. Maybe sometime…

Posted on

dusk over dun laoghaire

Dusk

Dusk

Treatment of a pair of dusk shots taken from the East Pier in Dun Loaghaire, just south of Dublin, Ireland.

These images show some of the weaknesses of iPhoto – both were manipulated using iPhoto, and because you can’t store the manipulated parameters short of writing them down, I had to guess at the settings from one photo to the next. You can see this in the slightly different hues in the images. If Apple were to revise iPhoto 6 to do this (currently 5.0.4 here), it would be a huge step forward. In light of the fact however that they’re introducing Aperture, I think the liklihood of a souped-up iPhoto 6 is questionable. However, since the technical requirements for Aperture seem pretty steep – you need a gig of RAM for instance – it won’t be accessible to a lot of ordinary users. I haven’t read anything on the rumour sites yet about a revised iPhoto. Maybe something will happen when 10.5 emerges in concert with the forthcoming Intel-based Macs.

Posted on

nep-o-tune

Nep-o-tune

Shona has been on at me about doing something with this shot of one of our kids – Ben – emerging from the waves in Wexford during what we call summer. It’s a rework of a previous offering with a bit of adjustment done in curves. I’m beginning to like the colour.

The title is a bad pun on Neptune and Nepotism. Oh well…

Posted on

lily composite

Gilding the Lily

This is a composite of a colour and infrared image. The camera was mounted on a tripod, then various bracketed exposures of the infrared image were taken, followed by a colour image in the same position. I chose a well exposed infrared image and combined it in Gimp with the colour image using overlay.

Because of the long exposures in infrared, I’m getting some weird noise artifacts and occasionally dead pixels. I thing the Ixus does a lot of processing internally when it takes long exposures to reduce the amount of noise, and it’s for this reason that I’d like to experiment using RAW format, which my camera doesn’t do.