Sunday, May 07, 2006

Image Transformation

After many years, I finally have a new picture for my home page. Here is the transformation from December 1998 to May 2006:
self => self => self
Clearly the main reason for a new picture was the quality of the old one; I don't look a day older, do I;-) My renewed interest in photography was sparked by the discovery of autostitch, a tool that stitches together pictures from different parts of the same scene. It allows easy composition of panoramas such as the following picture of a canal in Amersfoort:
canal / bridge
It is composed from a bunch (10?) pictures taken by hand (no tripod) with my not so fantastic Samsung digital camera. Autostitch discovers how to put the pieces together. It does not only work for landscape panoramas, as illustrated by the following 180 degrees interior shot:
interior
It can also be used for funny things such as the following composition of three pictures I took back in 2004 at OOPSLA/GPCE in Vancouver of Martin Bravenboer and Jurgen Vinju:
Bravenboer & Vinju
Or even more surrealistic compositions with multiple occurrences of the same people:
garden
See my autostitch experiments for more examples. That was a fun diversion in the past week. I've neglected this blog for a while. Much has happened in the meantime, and there are many plans for new (program) transformation work. Now that I've found time for messing around with picture transformation, I expect I'll find time for new blogs as well in the near future. Stay tuned. (I will mainly publish new photos at my flickr account.)

2 comments:

Arthur said...

As said, Eelco, I really like your panos. They may become even nicer if you crop them such that the black areas fall off. If you don't have enough 'photo' in some corners, just clone that in your favourite drawing app (the corners are usually sky or grass anyway).

Unknown said...

Right, Arthur. I've started experimenting with cropping. The result can indeed be a neater, but in some of the pictures there would be too much loss. And then starts the part where I have to invest a lot of time in learning to use tools. I'll probably have to do that anyway if I'd want to make any progress with this stuff. But so far it was quick and easy; with more manipulation photography will be again like the chore it was in the days of black and white printing.