This is one more picture made in Carolina, countryside of Maranhão, northeast Brazil. We were there, just taking some sun at Pousada do Lajes. Bruno wanted one more time to appear in all the photos I do to make the panorama, and that’s been done. Even having many natural pools, water falls, lakes and other natural attractions, a “normal” pool has also it’s value. For the kids fun is what matters. A beautiful immersive panoramic picture is a good way of keeping this moment in our memories and makes it easy to share our view of the place. I hope you get amused with the blue sky as we did.
I just need to remember of recording the sound to create a better environment to the picture.
Hi guys, I know some fellows that will probably complain when they see this photo… third time at the same place … 🙂 I can’t help it, it is the most practical place to try new ideas.
This time I tried to repeat exactly the same shooting point of the previous picture, but at night! The challenge was the long exposure using the pole. I think it looks good, check it out!
Night picture data sheet:
The data sheet of the daytime picture is in this other post.
Spin: 8 stops at 45 degrees spinning in the horizontal with the cam at about 30º down + 8 stops at 45 degrees spinning in the horizontal with the cam at about 30º up
Pictures: 4 JPG’s with auto-bracketing with 0EV +2EV +4EV +6EV using the Magic Lantern firmware
EXIF: ISO 100, f16, 2s + 10s + 42s + 170s, fixed white balance
Final image size: 14978×7489 pixels = 112 megapixels
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.
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.
during Rio de Janeiro Carnival you can follow more than 180 groups in only one weekend. The groups are usually called “blocos” that I guess can be translated to block in English. Last February 12th I went to photograph a block called Vira Lata. I put a pole over the truck to shoot the crowd following the group. You can see the panoramic picture to listen to their sound.
Technical datasheet:
This time I have used a new adapter to hold the pole. It was simply an aluminum bar over which I put my foot to keep the pole fixed. The truck was shaking very much and it made the stitching very complicated and mainly on the nadir view the immersive panorama needed a lot of post edition in GIMP. Besides that there was the expected difficulty of joining pictures of moving people. It is easy to find some people without head and some other body parts apart.
In this immersive panorama we can see a group of friends from Trilharte in a photographic meeting at “Museu da República” (Republic Museum) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The museum is installed in the old Palácio Nova Friburgo (New Friburg Palace), also known as Palácio das Águias (Eagles Palace). Nowadays it is called Palácio do Catete. Built between 1858 and 1867 it has been the headquarters of Brazilian Republican government during 64 years. 18 presidents have used its installations. Juscelino Kubitschek has finished the presidential age of the place, with the transfer of the federal government to Brasília in 1960. The presidential room has been where the president Getúlio Vargas has committed suicide in August, 1954. More information in Portuguese at the Museum’s site.
Technical datasheet:
I still need to increase the pole stability somehow. It has been used at half high in this picture. One of the problems of the way I am using to stabilize it now is that it takes me too much time. I am using strings from the top until each tripod leg extreme. I need to put strength to each rope little by little in order not to bend the pole. I am thinking of some kind of gear to pull the three strings together.
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.
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.