“He began to take some impressive landscape photographs, notably of the extraordinary mountains and forests around the Yosemite valley.” 

Frans Lanting’s lyrical nature photos

David Griffin on how photography connects us

Jonathan Klein: Photos that changed the world

While you’re there you might want to explore.

Happy Birthday Hubble, thank you for the amazing pictures.

Here’s the steps:

1. Take some pictures. For this I used a set of snaps of the downtown Seattle skyline from across the bay in West Seattle.

   

2. Stitch them together to build the panorama. For this I used the Image Composite Editor (ICE) from Microsoft Research

   

   Which resulted in a rather large TIFF file – 24,101 x 2890 pixels. But only because I was being excessive…

3. Clean up in Photoshop by cloning the sky and cropping out the water to compensate for the poor job I did aligning successive frames when taking the pictures (note to self, next time use a tripod or find a flat surface to rest the camera on)

   

4. Compensate for the change in cloud cover because if we just wrap the scene difference in cloud density and texture from left to right results in a noticeable join. To compensate I masked out the buildings; grabbed some cloud from the left; flipped and stretch and placed behind the buildings on the right; then used a gradient mask to blend into the original sky.
   Here’s the sky at the right end of the panorama before (left) and after (right) the compensation:

     
   

5. Convert to polar coordinates by
   1. first resizing to a square image (Image | Resize… ensuring constrain proportions is off)
   2. flipping vertically
   3. and then using the Polar filter (Filter | Distort | Polar Coordinates…) to convert to polar coordinates and get the wrapped circular effect
6. Tweak using the imaging tool of your choice.

Enjoy.

First Gotcha: Open services are limited

“Openness” is a good thing, some people think so good that “open systems win”. The trouble is that open is a slippery thing, I can’t just grab the blogger code and run it on a server I control because that code is available to me. The code for blogger isn’t “open”. This is one of the problems of the services world – the service can change, or go away, and you have no control. That’s a contrast to the software that runs on my computer where I decide whether the value of upgrading is worth the cost (in $ or time).

This meant that I couldn’t just move the blog without some surgery, the surgery meaning choosing something else to run the blog. I went with WordPress. Nuff said.

Open data to the rescue

Fortunately, although closed at the code level, blogger is open at the data level. You can export to an XML file (formatted as ATOM file) either directly into another blog platform or manually from the blogger dashboard to party on with your own code. Google provide the details.

Using this capability I was all set to move to an alternative way of hosting, without loosing too much (see the third gotcha). The auto import into WordPress failed (I suspect that was because of the way I FTP publish but I couldn’t be bothered to explore further) but someone wrote some code to convert between formats and helpfully hosted it on appengine.

Second Gotcha: Deep Linking

Deep linking is one of those great things that you miss only when it’s gone. Deep linking lets people link to content within a site. Moving from Blogger to Wordpress meant changing the way pages are referenced (actually it doesn’t, although it’s a real PITA to get the two to mesh) which means that although you can easily import posts, existing links to content from external or internal pages break unless you retain the existing structure.

Third Gotcha: Devil in the detail

It’s all the small things that get you. Importing (or not) comments; finding plug-ins to replicate things like recent posts; figuring out why imports failed (process memory limits on the server) and how to work around; getting the custom root configured; tweaking CSS; and having to do it all twice.

Reflection

It all appears to be up and running now, and it’s better than before since I have more control to tweak and customize, except it was good enough before so the “better” isn’t really better. This little episode highlighted some of the good things about ‘openness’ and also some of the limits, and why it’s an idea to beware of open services that aren’t. I’m sure James will remind me of that.

Here’s a snapshot of the Kodak Photography channel in ‘playback’ mode. I think this is how I stumbled on the Daily Shoot…

One of the tricks to improving at photography is to practice capturing images that convey something that someone else set the brief for.

The daily shoot does just that. Follow @dailyshoot on twitter; you’ll get a new brief | assignment | challenge each day, take a picture and then post a link.

The humble effort above is for assignment 77, wherever there’s an edge, and is a partial reflection of Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear.

Thank you James and Mike for executing on such a great idea.