this one comes with a big delay. The birthday meeting has been in August 2011. Guess who is celebrating? The hostess Valéria has achieved Bruno’s record and has shown herself 8 times in the picture.
360° Panoramic Birthday
Technical data sheet:
People got too close to each other at this picture. It has made the stitching a little difficult. Most of the joining job has been made in GIMP. In a group like that, where there is people in almost all the horizontal field of view, it is maybe necessary to do a more intensive direction job to guide people’s position and avoid hours and hours of post edition.
this 360×180 panorama will surely get into the highlights. It was shot in June 14th, 2011 and I only finished this by now, in January 2012. I’ve had some difficulties that made me postpone the final result to make it good enough as this one deserves.
I have visited the place casually for the fist time. I went there for a music meeting when I did another panorama and saw that room when I passed by. Then I have called the club asking to make this picture. This was the first real test I made with my new (at that time) Sigma 10-20mm.
The place is quite beautiful and has been restored in 2011. The building has been built between 1907 and 1910 and have been opened in June, 1910. According to the Naval Club site (in Portuguese), has been projected by the architect Tomazzo G. Bezzi, built by the responsibility of the engineer Heitor de Mello and the artistic decoration was made by Hélios Aristides Seelinger. The building in eclectic style, with Italian Renascence elements, has been protected by Brazilian law in 1987. Together with the Municipal Theater, the Federal Justice Cultural Center (old Supreme Federal Tribunal), National Museum of Fine Arts, National Library and Pedro Ernesto Palace integrates the Downtown Cultural Corridor in Rio de Janeiro. I personally would put the Portuguese Royal Reading Cabinet in this group.
Naval Club Noble Room - RJ, Brazil
Technical datasheet:
This has been the first panorama I did with this lens, mentioned below. I was still using my first self made panorama head in my tripod and this one was a little harder to adjust. With my lack of experience with this lens I got two big holes in the floor, without any image corresponding to them. It took me a long time to cover them, because I have tested many ways to do that in order to learn and to find a better one. I still think it could have been better done, but it comes a time when you need to choose when to stop, otherwise you never finish. Who knows someday I don’t take it again to make it as perfect as I wish. The best way I think would be manually cover the wholes with the clone and healing tool in GIMP.
A very nice discover has been Multiblend. It is much much faster than Enblend. Although people said it doesn’t make a much smart seam choice, this image didn’t need that, so the faster time has been really good here. It took less than 2 minutes and Enblend would take about one hour I guess. Using Multiblend I could achieve a bigger image that I used to do. From the 12,000 x 6,000 pixels that I used to do, I passed to 25,000 x 12,500, coming from a resolution of around 90megapixels to around 300, what makes a much better zoom experience. Another thing that contributed with the possibility to work with a bigger image has been a new computer I got. Only on it I got to edit the final image for last little corrections and I also did it on the cube faces instead of the equirectangular, reducing the size of the edited image.
Another curious thing that I experienced with this big image was a “convert” memory limit (convert is a tool from ImageMagick). It has not been able to transform the final image to generate my thumbnails. I tested it on Windows and FreeBSD and it crashed due to lack of memory. GIMP did the job with no problem. Maybe there is some configuration option I don’t know in convert, but I guess it could be a little smarter by itself. I ran it with 8GB of RAM and it didn’t use it.
after a month without publishing due to vacation, end of the year and so on, I come back here. The first 2012 panorama is from 2011, as it could be expected. This was made during the workshop on Immersive Panoramas with Opensource Software at the IV GnuGraf, in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. It was on September 11th at UNIRIO, a University in town. The guy standing up and giving instructions is me with a FreeBSD T-shirt from its 10th anniversary in 2003 (ok, it’s an old T-shirt).
It was a Sunday morning, 9AM and it was raining. This made me believe that the 7 students that have shown up were an excellent number of spectators to the meeting. The picture was used to teach how to make a 360×180 degrees panorama. I thought about doing an outdoor image, but the rain made me give up.
There is no special or ordinary beauty in the picture, but it is reasonably well done and is a good souvenir to remember the moment. It was my first class on this subject.
This meeting was on last July 3rd to celebrate Bruno’s birthday. He is my older kid. We joined the family and some closer friends and I did one more 360 panoramic picture to register the moment. This kind of picture is really very nice to feel the ambiance of the place. It is almost like if you were there, possibly that is why they call it “Immersive Picture” 🙂
During the Meeting
Technical Datasheet:
This panorama let me satisfied with two aspects. First I got specially amazed with the very good fit of the lines on the floor at the bottom view (nadir). One can view some color difference, but the lines are pretty continuous and straight. The other thing I liked was the result of the noise reduction. I have used a specific tool for that called Neat Image. The indoor scenes with people moving at night without flash are usually difficult to do. Probably I would have been able to improve image quality if I had already used RAW at that time.
this is one more 360 picture in a Music at the Museum project. This one was taken last June during a presentation of Pablo Lapidusas, a Brazilian pianist. On this one we can see a beautiful room of the National Museum of Fine Arts, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Please, never mind about the sound quality, cause I recorded it on my cell phone.
Pablo Lapidusas at the Piano in Rio
Technical data sheet:
I liked the final image quality. There are some ghosts due to the combination of 3 expositions with enfuse. Whoever moved turned into a ghost 🙂
The National Library is at Rio Branco avenue, one of the main streets at Rio de Janeiro Downtown. It stands near other historical buildings like the Theatro Municipal (Municipal Theater) and the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes (Fine Arts Museum). Considered by UNESCO one of the 10 bigger national libraries in the world, it is also the biggest in Latin America. Its collection is estimated in about 9 million items (uau!). The building was inaugurated in 1910 after 5 years of being built. You can see the library site for more information (in portuguese only).
It has been interesting doing this panorama. I went out without destiny at my lunch time with all the equipment in my backpack. Before arriving to the library I have been to the Municipal Theater, which was closed, and to the Fine Arts Museum, where I have not been allowed to take a picture with a tripod. Its entrance hall could be photographed but the light there was no good at that time. Guess I was lucky. At the library I had permition to use the tripod. The final result was this wonderful image. IMHO the best I have made until now and strangely one that was easier to stitch and that needed less post edition.
The shooting took about 15 minutes. By the middle of it two tourists asked me to free their way to take a picture. I tried to explain that if I stopped I would have to begin all over again. I hope they understood me :).
I went in touch with the library managers asking to take 360 pictures inside the library, where taking pictures is now allowed. I am waiting their next contact to schedule that. If it happens surely I will post here the images, probably in a virtual tour format.
