A while back, I was commissioned to create a GigaPan (wiki) of a machine shop/factory in Coeur d’Alene as a fund raiser for our trip to Kansas City, Missouri. I have attempted these in the past (2 to be exact), and they came out decent, however none have been great. On this one, I was able to use a Canon 70-200 f/2.8L borrowed from my teacher. This, for one thing, allowed the images to be sharper. Also, I had more ambient light this time, because the two past ones were shot in the evening while it was overcast. The factory had many artificial lights available, as well as bright sunlight coming through the garage doors (overexposed in the images).
This project has taken many hours, and each time I do one, I vow to myself that I will never again do it without a machine, but each time I forget how hard to are to edit. With a GigaPan Machine, it calculates the distance to move the tripod each time, so it can easily merge the images together in the computer. However, when doing it manually, I have to do it by eye, and guess how far to move it each time. As a result, there is one spot where there is no image. This was unfortunate as it was in a spot where I couldn’t easily clone in image from other areas.

The other reason it took so long is that once the image is done, Photoshop takes a century to save the image as a tiff — First there is “Generating Full Resolution Composite,” then it has to generate preview, then it has to prepare to save, and lastly it has to “Save Large Document Format.” LDF is a format like PSD, however it doesn’t have a 2GB cap on each file, so you can save enormous images to the file container. In this case, the document was 9.5GB.

After saving the document, the upload took a very long time as the final compressed Tiff file was 1.3 gb. I uploaded the panorama to GigaPan.org using their uploader while I was staying at a hotel, and as a result, it took quite a long time using their insanely fast 120kbps connection.

Anyway, the panorama turned out nice, and I am happy to have it finished as it took so long to complete.

–Scott

This is my first post to this blog, out of High School, without being graded, without any of that.

Yesterday, on my way downtown, as I was leaving my house, I spied, not 1, not 2, but 3 rainbows in the sky (you can only see two in this photo). I happened to have my camera handy, so of course I had to photograph it. I decided that since I had just finished my final on HDR, this would be a good chance to utilize it. I took three bracketed exposures on AEB (auto exposure bracketing) handheld – that was no easy feat.

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During the awards ceremony at SkillsUSA State, one person from the Twin Falls satellite campus of the College of Southern Idaho won first place. Do you know what it said on the slideshow in huge letters?

None other than CSI: Twin Falls. Although we knew that they obviously didn’t mean this, it still was funny to see.

Attn Twitchell: This is not a project, please do not grade me for this, thank you.

Focus208 – Coeur d’Alene from Scott Sturges on Vimeo.

In an ongoing attempt to photograph the state of Idaho, otherwise known as Focus208, I have taken some photos around downtown Coeur d’Alene, Id.

I chose to photograph the two blocks between Sherman and Front Avenue, and 4th and 6th street. I wanted to show some of the “urban-decay” (as in the alley ways and rundown walls) as well as the new urbanization (such as the new towers) of downtown.

The photos were processed from Camera RAW in Photoshop CS4, where light adjustments were made, and sharpening was applied. Unfortunately, I over-sharpened some of my images, but for the most part they all look pretty decent. They were then processed through my fancy Focus208 Photoshop action, which essentially resizes them, adds a border, adds my name, and saves it as a jpg.

After editing the photos, I made them into a slideshow (above) and added the music, Analog Plan by Thomas Schneider, found on Freeplaymusic.com. The slideshow was compiled in Picasa 3 for Mac from Google in 720p resolution (because 1080p takes too long to upload). I actually liked using the program a lot despite it being slightly glitchy software.

This project took me an insane amount of time for some reason, it seemed that I was overthinking some of the process, as it took me several days to edit the photos. Just prepping the video and making this post took over 4 hours.

There was some inspiration from Digital Photography School, Urban Landscape Photography Tips.

Below are the contact sheets of the photos taken on the assignment.

Center of map

map

map

map

balloonlelss markjer

Lastly, there was an extremely blurry shot of Josh Stevens that I took while shooting this project that Twitchell (linked due to request) liked, so I’ll post it for your viewing…

Last week, my photography class traveled to Boise to compete in a photography competition through SkillsUSA Idaho in Boise, Idaho. Our class competed in two different competitions, Photography, and Promotional Bulletin Board. Later, I’ll post the whole bulletin board project as I am finally done with it and I presented it successfully (1st place FTW).

Anyway, for the photography competition, we were bussed to Columbia High School in Nampa, Idaho to begin the competition. After we picked up some more students, we all went to Downtown Nampa for the shooting portion. We were assigned to shoot the Urban Decay of Nampa.

Below are the shots I chose and edited for the competition.

I ended up using the alley way shot a book cover project for the book Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Unfortunately, I do not have the originals for all of them, just the ones I edited, because the judges kind of stole our cards. So below I posted a contact sheet with the originals. Finally, the inspiration of this post was completely the judge, as he set the requirement for it to be urban decay, so I can’t really post an inspiration link this week.

– Scott