Posts under ‘General’

Microsoft Virtual Earth adds Birds-Eye View to 3D Globe: “ We all somewhat guess this would be coming around and tonight Microsoft releases Birds-eye View for their 3D Globe. They’ve taken those great Birds-eye View images from the 2D maps and using Photosynth they stiched them all together to create a ‘3D World’. Now of [...]

Carnegie Mellon University researchers, working with NASA Ames Research Center scientists, have developed an inexpensive robotic device that allows any digital camera to take gigapixel panoramic photographs, known as GigaPans. The technology is being used by students to document their communities and by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to make Civil War sites accessible on the [...]

“Classic situation: You are in a church with a beautiful stain-glass window. You want to take a photo but you realize you have to make a choice: you either take a slow exposure shot of the window, meaning that the rest of the image will be way underexposed, or you try to take a photo [...]

“In short, I do like Stitcher. If you want to create multi-shot panoramas (e.g., more than eight images), the speed efficiency is reason enough to consider using Stitcher over Photoshop. … Because of the limited new functionality in this version, I am only giving it a 3 “A” rating. If you are new to Stitcher, [...]

Where Does Color Come From?: “Color is all around us. We look at a tree and see green, or we look at a stop sign and see red. The sky looks blue and flowers come in all sorts of different colors. As photographers, most of us shoot in color, but have you ever stopped to [...]

John Krygier wrote “I sat down one day and made a list of Tufteisms from the book” … leading to “20 Tufteisms from The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” which he then distills down to six commandments. As someone who has three of Tufte’s books, this is quite interesting. Another aspect I liked in the [...]

First Thoughts on Nikon’s Big Announcement: “The long period of gossip and rumors about a possible Nikon full-frame DSLR came to an end this week with the announcement of the new Nikon D3 featuring the new FX format sensor (24 x 36mm). Nikon also announced the DX format D300 body as a successor to the [...]

The Guardian considers the commodification of photography… “the difference between a professional and an amateur is not that the amateur never takes really good pictures. It is that the professional will always come up with usable ones.”

REALVIZ Stitcher Updated for Intel Macs: “REALVIZ announced the immediate availability of Stitcher 5.6 on Thursday. The updated version of the photo stitching and panorama creation application now runs natively on Intel and PowerPC-based Macs” (Via The Mac Observer.)

In my last post, I mentioned how there was one prototype of the glass San Francisco map that used the typeface Klavika, and while it wasn’t chosen for the final product, I was very curious how it would work for a city map. Well the answer can be seen in the Portland map series project [...]

I meant to announce this some time ago when it was unveiled. I’ve gotten quite a few queries regarding aspects of this map, so I’m posting some more info about it. From across the lobby of the San Francisco Business District Hilton, the map looks like it is one giant sheet of glass, twelve feet [...]

Panoweaver 5.0 for Panorama Creation Released: “The updated photo stitching software uses fisheye images to create 360-degree spherical panoramas. Panoweaver is used by photographers, real estate agents, Web designers, project managers and even crime scene investigators to create panoramic images. It’s known for suppporting a wide variety of image input formats (JPG, TIFF, BMP, PICT, [...]