NASA has decided to get the public involved in taking pictures of Mars with the HiRISE camera, currently in orbit around the planet. Read more here.
Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category
Taking pictures of Mars
Friday, January 22nd, 2010NASA Photos
Thursday, January 7th, 2010A wonderful collection of the best NASA photos are available on the Air & Space website, including a photo of the Shuttle Enterprise with the cast of Star Trek posing in front of it.
The alternative to a single 3D camera…
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009… is to use two synchronised 2D cameras. You just need StereoData Maker, two cameras, a z-bar to mount the cameras, and a switch which you can build or buy.
Hyper Definition Virtual Tour of Cape Town
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009An incredible panoramic view of Cape Town can be seen on Virtual Africa’s website. It consists of no less than 1850 x 10 Megapixel images – a staggering 25GB of RAW data! But while the statistics sound amazing, it is nothing compared to the actual image. Have a look – it is more than worthwhile to spend the bandwidth on it!
Snowflakes
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009Macro-photography; snowflakes… need I say more? Some pretty awesome photographs here.
Stitching Panoramic Photos… for free!
Friday, November 27th, 2009While searching for a free solution for stitching some panoramic photos, I came across Microsoft Image Composite Editor. It is a free Microsoft Research project. Its user interface is simple and very easy to use, and the results are really good. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are available.
Here is small version of a late afternoon panorama of Jacobs Bay, stitched with Microsoft Image Composite Editor.
Jacobs Bay panorama
Interchangeable Sensors
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009In the natural evolution of camera systems, Ricoh (that famed cultist camera maker) has unveiled their latest system involving a camera body and an interchangeable lens & sensor system. Though the lenses and sensors are coupled into a single package, methinks it won’t be long before someone figures out how to decouple that… upgrading your camera might mean just replacing the sensor sometime in the near future :) More details at: http://www.dpreview.com/news/0911/09111001ricohgxr.asp
Astrophotography
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009A natural extension of technology becoming cheaper is that it allows us to do some really cool stuff – while trawling through the Net, I came across this very useful tutorial on Astrophotography (http://www.astro.shoregalaxy.com/dslr_astro.htm).
On a related topic, Axel Mellinger has created a 648 Megapixel image of the milky way by stitching together around 3000 individual photos! More details at http://home.arcor.de/axel.mellinger/.
Creating Your Own Stereo Images
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009Stereoscopy has been around for a long time… in fact, it Sir Charles Wheatstone is credited with its invention in 1838. With displays such as the Zalman Trimon monitor, it becomes possible to view stereoscopic images on your computer without having to resort to using anaglyph glasses. Quite a number of .jps and other 3D images are available on the Internet already. But the fun really starts when you create your own stereo images!
StereoPhoto Maker is a very good freeware tool for creating your own images. It can be used with anaglyph glasses. The difficult part is to take two photographs of the same object from slightly different angles, as closely as possible to the different perspectives captured by a person’s two eyes. The automatic positioning in StereoPhoto Maker works quite well, producing the final 3D image in no time. The application does also provide the functionality to tweak the image manually.