May this new year be all you want it to be!

Just cuz we’re celebrating in the restaurant we’re planning to hold our wedding in, doesn’t mean we can’t bake some scones and corn “fingers” for afternoon tea!

People will do weird things to get a picture of themselves with the august Mademoiselle Liberte, and believe it or not, lying down on the little parapet that separates the lawn from the walkway was actually a rather popular choice, altho it imposed some groveling on the part of the person with the camera.

Of course, some people make it work better than others… and I suppose this is better than the guy who had his girlfriend strip down to her skirt and silk camisole in the biting winter wind and pretend to hold up the statue on her upturned palm.

On a technical note, I didn’t have time to switch lenses so I shot this one in three exposures which I later stitched together. The only other benefit to my laziness is that this artificially expanded the depth of field since each exposure was focused in a different spot, altho if you look closely you will find weird spots of softness in the stitch.

As long as your subjects don’t move fast and don’t overlap (creating parallax issues), this works relatively well, particularly with a longer lens.

I shoot everything in RAW now; Picasa handles that format just fine, converting it to a JPEG on the fly — and I suspect with better algorithms than in-camera — with the ‘as-shot’ settings. If I want to fiddle with the conversion — to save some shadow detail, extend the dynamic range, or change the white balance — it lets me open it in Photoshop from which I can save the new settings and thereafter open the picture with those settings in Picasa. This is the dream workflow for me.

It’s done wonders for my density, my colours, my shadow details and my noise levels. The last mostly because I never apply a ‘Levels’ command to the compressed data of the JPEG since I get the histogram I want directly from the linear data of the RAW file.

This is the only way to shoot sunsets if you ask me, with their combination of low light levels and tricky colours.

EDIT: This is a panoramic stitch again, and I went with a soft resize on the basis of yesterday’s experiment.

Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees.Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

“In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is ‘no comment.’”

In a letter released today, PEER urged the new Director of the National Park Service (NPS), Mary Bomar, to end the stalling tactics, remove the book from sale at the park and allow park interpretive rangers to honestly answer questions from the public about the geologic age of the Grand Canyon. PEER is also asking Director Bomar to approve a pamphlet, suppressed since 2002 by Bush appointees, providing guidance for rangers and other interpretive staff in making distinctions between science and religion when speaking to park visitors about geologic issues.

via Think Progress.

Panoramic stitching is great for architectural pictures, since it takes care of perspective distortions for you, and nets you mundo pixels. The only problem is… you need to resize the results, and resizing requires a compromise between sharpness of details and artifacts like moire patterns. I don’t like compromises in photography, particularly for sharpness.

Above is a prime example. It’s a vertical stitch of an office tower with lots of very regular, gridlike detail (the worst kind for this). The bit in the center gives you an idea of the original (none too sharp, it was getting dark and I shot at f2.8 ). The four resizes I used are: Gaussian Blur before a Bicubic resize, a Bicubic Smoother resize, an Un-Sharp Mask before a Bicubic, and a Bicubic Sharper.

Note that the first two are very soft (unpleasingly so) while the last two show weird texture artifacts in the grid pattern, which mar the regularity of the facade (which I hate even more than the softness). A straight up Bicubic Resize (not shown) gives an unhappy compromise.

It drives me nuts to see people post good, sharp pictures to Flickr, and then let the damn thing do a horrible, soft resize to 500 px for the version most people look at. I’m a sharpness nazi, and like punctuation or grammar sticklers (yes, I got ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves‘ for Xmas) this makes me perpetually unhappy.

This is why I tend to post huge pictures and why I’m so happy with the large image viewer. It probably means I should move back to film and make big, highly detailed prints… but where would that leave the blog, eh?