{"id":617,"date":"2012-05-01T09:02:55","date_gmt":"2012-05-01T16:02:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/?p=617"},"modified":"2012-05-01T09:11:10","modified_gmt":"2012-05-01T16:11:10","slug":"my-week-with-gigapan-schlepping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/?p=617","title":{"rendered":"My week with the Gigapan, schlepping"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I\u2019ve been schlepping my big video tripod (25 lbs.) up and down mountains this weekend, carrying the Gigapan Epic Pro mount (about 5 lbs.), and also carrying my camera bag (13 lbs.) which has my camera and lenses and an old banana peel in it.<\/p>\n

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My position in Pirate\u2019s Cove, near Avila Beach, California. This beautiful spot was ideal for making a panoramic image. While the camera was making 504 images, I picked up two bags of litter from the rocks \u2013 fishing tackle, beer cans, cigarette butts, broken glass. When I climbed back up the hill I looked like a photographer-Bedouin.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s tough getting old.<\/p>\n

And, this equipment is getting on my nerves. It\u2019s an awful lot of weight to carry for the purposes of shooting a panoramic image. My normal rig is a carbon-fiber tripod with a Really Right Stuff head on it (about 4 lbs.) and my wooden panoramic head (.75 lbs.). I still have to carry the camera and lens, but the whole thing doesn\u2019t cut into my shoulder blades like the big tripod does. I noticed in the mirror this morning that I have bruises on my shoulders.<\/p>\n

GigapanMoves<\/a><\/p>\n

Click above to see a short movie of the Gigapan device as it moves my camera around a panorama. It takes a few minutes to download to your computer, so please be patient.
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On Sunday I took a photo at a local beach area called Pirate\u2019s Cove. This is a beautiful, quiet beach with several McMansions above it on the bluff. I was clambering down a hill to get to the rocky side of the cove when I realized that I was breaking through shoulder-high poison oak bushes. That, I thought, would complicate my project, but I forged ahead, making it safely to a rocky section of the cove where I made a Gigapan image of 504 images (63 rows of 8 columns). Two days later I have had no outbreak of Poison Oak, so I passed that test.<\/p>\n

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This is one version of my panoramic image at Pirate\u2019s Cove. This one was made by the Gigapan motorized head, but then stitched in PTGUI Pro. I made 37 horizontal images on the Gigapan in one row, then put it together in PTGUI. The scallops on the end indicate that I should have taken a few more images into the hillside, and then cropped the ends square.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

My folders of hundreds of images are brimming with files. I shot everything in Camera Raw, which allows me to convert these images into other formats for stitching: Gigapan software requires JPEG, PTGUI prefers TIFF. I feel safer with Raw images because I can adjust exposure, change shadow depth, and more. The size of all of this is mind-boggling. I continue to move, duplicate and duplicate again folders measured in the gigabytes. But, that is a small price to pay for the ultimate high-resolution panorama. I would hate to go out and make a huge collection of component images, and then not be able to use them because they were slightly overexposed.<\/p>\n

The Gigapan stitching software is amazingly slow. To stitch my first image took about half a day. I had to tell my Macintosh not to sleep so that the stitching software wouldn\u2019t pause in its multi-hour process. When it was finished, I uploaded the image to the Gigapan web site as a \u201cprivate\u201d photo, meaning that I\u2019m not sharing it with the world \u2013 yet. The panoramic projection created by Gigapan is spherical, and I always have a problem with images like that. I don\u2019t really want to look up into the blue sky. I want this to be a long horizontal panoramic of stunning resolution.<\/p>\n

Obviously I need to learn more about the Gigapan process, being one method to get bigger, higher resolution panoramic images.<\/p>\n

My experimentation continues\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been schlepping my big video tripod (25 lbs.) up and down mountains this weekend, carrying the Gigapan Epic Pro mount (about 5 lbs.), and also carrying my camera bag (13 lbs.) which has my camera and lenses and an … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,10,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-panoramic-photography","category-photography","category-software-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=617"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":621,"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions\/621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}