I thought I would show what the original pictures look like for the sunset panorama below. You have to be careful to overlap the pictures for the stitcher. The manual says overlap by 25%, but I find I can get away with a little less than that.





This is also something that can tax the performance of your computer. I read about a photogapher who specializes in panoramas and tends to end up with images of over 20 mega bytes in size. It goes without saying that he has an insanely powerful computer.

Finished Panorama

Here is the finished shot-aside from manipulating the brightness/contrast I also added some red and took some blue out of the picture. But not that much-there was a surprising amount of red in the original pictures.

More Sunset(s)

Just playing around with the Adobe Panorama stitcher again today. This was a sunset from two nights ago. This was two pictures that I took with the panorama setting on my Olympus on, then stitched together in Photoshop. It went together almost flawlessly this time. You've really got to know where to look to find the seam.

Shame, Hernandez NM

The Ansel Adams special on American Experience last night was excellent. The story about the photograph, "Moonrise, Hernandez NM" was a familiar one-I'm still amazed that such an incredible photograph was such a "one shot" deal. I tend to take at least one back up of every picture I take.

It also reminded me of this shot, taken at the same place looking at the same church. You can just see it peeking up over the garbage. In all fairness to the owner of this property-it has been somewhat cleaned up since I took this picture in 2003. I was working for the NM Environment Department and given the task of trying to get the owner to clean up his act. Whoever followed me in that job had more success than I did.

Ansel Adams on PBS

American Experience, a usually excellent show on PBS, has a segment on Ansel Adams on Monday evening. It should be worth watching for anyone interested in photography or art in general. Adams along with Eliot Porter, is one of my favorite photographers.

Fossil

We stayed at friends Chaz and Lori's house this weekend while Heather taught in Santa Fe. We were pretty lazy for the most part, but I did take these carefully posed pictures of a fossil shell that Chaz has on his patio.

Fossils

Here is another, carefully posed picture of the fossils.

Puget Sound

Here is a picture I took a long time ago in the San Juan Islands in the Puget Sound in Washington.
Ruth likes this one. It always interests me what people besides me think of my photos-sometimes I end up re-visiting photos that I didn't particularly like at first.

We are headed off to NM tomorrow. The weather is sounding weird down there-should be some interesting sunsets.

Is it spring yet?

Went for a walk today hoping to find some sign of spring-anything. I guess you could say the mud is a sign of spring.
I did see a lot of dead sunflowers from last year.

Another Sunset

Yet another view out our back door this evening.
What was that movie where Harvey Keitel has photographed the same scene every day for years and has albums full of the same pictures? I think it was "Smoke."
I sure do like this place where we live-nice to watch the sun go down every evening.

Dizzy Chickadee

This Chickadee caught my eye because he/she seemed to be enjoying being upside down on the feeder. It was the only bird there and stayed on the bottom of the feeder long enough for me to go find my camera (sometimes a major chore in itself), set up and get the picture.

Utah Cow Starters

Just fooling around with some old pictures today in Photoshop. I started with this interesting, but pretty unexciting picture of a cow on a cliff I took in Utah a few years ago. I selected the sky by using the magic wand tool to select the black of the cliff, then reversing the selection to get nothing but sky. This selected the bushes on the cliff more clearly than selecting the sky first. Then I copied it and created another layer.





Then I opened up this pretty but not too exciting sunset I photographed in New Mexico. I selected the part of the sky I wanted to use and copied that.
Then I went back to the cow picture and pasted the sunset sky into the sky layer.

Utah Cow

And this is what I ended up with.

Cement Plant

Here is the old cement plant behind our house again. I took this picture on the way home today. The sun was directly behind the plant.

Maybe it is squirrel proof!

Looking at another picture from yesterday I see how the squirrel proofing works. This guy/gal doesn't look like he's going hungry.

Storm Squirrel

So much for this feeder being "squirrel proof." Squirrel resistant maybe. This guy/gal jumped to the patio table, then the windowsill and onto the feeder.
I walked right up to the window and banged on the window. At first he just turned and looked at me as if saying, "WHAT!!!!????"