DIY Panoramic Head

August 4th, 2012

I’ve been trying to figure out how to make interactive panoramas for the web. One of the problems is capturing the images.

I have a tripod and fisheye lens, so I was most of the way to shooting perfect panos, but you get parallax issues. As you rotate the camera its perspective changes; it’s position is moving in a circle, so you can see past stuff in one shot that you couldn’t in another. That causes glitches in the stitched-together panorama.

You can buy a head to help you shoot perfect panoramas, or even get a robotic one that does the whole thing for you. I’m too tight for that, so I made one out of wood and leftover pieces of Ikea furniture.

It has 3 holes for the camera, allowing me to point the camera up, down or straight. By using up and down positions, I can get a fairly good vertical field of view from my lowly non-fullframe camera. Read the rest of this entry »

Jubilee Christmas Party 2011

December 10th, 2011
Jubilee Christmas Party 2011
Jubilee Christmas Party 2011

I’ve borrowed a flash, and this is a shot at a (very dark) Christmas party. I’m pretty pleased that it’s possible to capture a nice portrait, even when it’s pretty much pitch black.

I’ve been reading Strobist, so want to get an off-camera flash. For now, I’m making do with reflecting the flash off something.

Next time, I’ll have to play with the camera more in manual mode, to try and get at least some of the background, and Christmas party atmosphere!

50mm

April 10th, 2010

My favourite photos taken with my favourite lens: a 50mm f/1.4 Read the rest of this entry »

The Rule of Thirds

January 10th, 2010
The Rule of Thirds
The Rule of Thirds

I got a book about taking photos. It was cheap, but turns out that when it was written, any camera worth using was still analogue or wet. It talks a lot about chemicals and filters and film. However – I’m sure most of the concepts are still the same with digital photography, so I’m looking forward to developing some skills.

The first thing I’ve played with is the rule of thirds. Apparently you shouldn’t normally put your subject in the middle of the photo. Who knew?! I had a go at cropping photos taken at Kew Gardens a couple of weeks ago using the rule of thirds. Has it made the photos more vivid and captivating? Read the rest of this entry »

First SLR

December 30th, 2009
First SLR
First SLR

Caroline and I enjoy photography. We don’t have a lot of time to really develop skills, but like having collections of photos. When we went to New York in 2008, we planned to get our first SLR camera. Instead we got ripped off and came home with a point & shoot pretending to be an SLR (Panasonic DMC-FZ1) having paid twice what a consumer SLR should cost.

This time we were more careful and calculated and I managed to find a brilliant bargain for a Canon 450D – an actual SLR! We picked it up from Comet last night and had a play around.