Category: photos

Im Zentrum der Macht

The Government District in Berlin, with the Reichstag and the offices of the members of the Bundestag:

Im Zentrum der Macht

The Diana Temple in the Hofgarten in Munich:

Hofgarten

The Königsplatz in Munich:

Königsplatz

The Residenz in Munich:

Residenz

View from the tower of Old St. Peter in Munich:

St. Peter

Green pastures of Hamburg-Wohldorf:

Wohldorfer Feld

All my panoramic photos. (Warning! Page contains a lot of oversized, badly scaled images.)


Suomenlinna

Suomenlinna


On Using Hugin

On popular request, here are a few suggestions how to make best use of Hugin for stitching your panoramas. You probably should have read some of the tutorials at Hugin's web site before reading these suggestions.

  • Use manual exposure settings in your camera. On Canon cameras this means you should be using the "M" mode. Make sure choose good exposure times and aperture so that the entire range you plan to take photos of is well exposed. If you don't know how to use the "M" mode of your camera you probably should be reading an introduction into photography now. The reason for setting exposure values manually is that you want the same exposing on all photos from your settings.
  • Disable automatic white balance mode. You probably should have done that anyway. "Semi-automatic" white balance mode is probably OK (i.e. selecting the white balance from one of the pre-defined profiles, such as "Daylight", "Cloudy", ...)
  • Also manually set the ISO level. You probably should be doing that anyway.
  • Using autofocus is probably OK.
  • Try not not move around too much while taking the photo series. Hugin doesn't like that too much. It's OK to move a little, but you should do all the shots for your panorama from a single point, and not while moving on a circle, line, or even Bezier-line.
  • When doing 360° panoramas it is almost guaranteed (at least in northern countries) that you have the sun as back light. That will overexpose the panorama in that direction and lower the contrast in the area. To work against this, you might want to choose to do your panorama shots at noon in summer when sun is in zenith. Gray-scaling the shot and doing some other kind of post-processing might be a way to ease this problem.
  • To work against chromatic aberration it is a good idea to use large overlap areas, and doing your shots in "landscape" rather then "portrait" (so that only the center of each image is used in the final image)
  • Running hugin/enblend on an encrypted $HOME (like I do) won't make you particularly happy.
  • Pass -m 256 to enblend. At least on my machine (with limited RAM and dm-crypt) things are a lot faster that way.
  • Sometimes moving things (e.g. people) show up twice (or even more times) in the resulting panorama. Sometimes that is funny, sometimes it is not. To remove them, open the seperate tif files before feeding them into enblend into Gimp and cut away the things you want to remove from all but one of these images. Then pass that on to enblend.
  • If regardless how many control points you set in Hugin the images just don't fit together, you should probably run "Optimize Everything" instead of just "Optimize Positions".
  • When doing your shots, make sure to hold the camera all the time at the same height, to avoid having to cut too much of the image away in the final post-processing. This is sometimes quite difficult, especially if you have images with no clear horizon.
  • Remember that you can set horizontal and vertical lines as control points in Hugin! Good for straitening things out and making sure that vertical things are actually vertical in the resulting panorama.

Helsingin Tuomiokirkko

Following an invitation of the Nokia 770/N800 multimedia team I've been visiting the Nokia research center in Helsinki last week. A good opportunity to get some more material for Hugin:

Helsingin Tuomiokirkko


Panoramic Hamburg

Did I mention I love Hugin? I do, I really do:

Hamburg Rathausmarkt

Hamburg Central Station

Hamburg Alsterarkaden


Three Sisters

Finally I found the time to sort my photos from Australia, when I vistited the country after linux.conf.au, in January this year. Some photos are quite good, many are not. However one panoramic view of the Three Sisters in the Blue Mountains NP is particularly beautiful:

Three Sisters

Just perfect as a desktop background on your Xinerama setup!


San Francisco

As a followup to my Windows of Barcelona series I prepared Windows of San Francisco:

Windows of San Francisco

A few other series :

Adjazenz!

No, the German names and numbers of the series don't have any special meaning, their sole purpose is to sound "artsy", in the spirit of the famous work "Fluktuation 8" by a certain polish action artist.

The remaining photos I made during my visit in San Francisco after the Ubuntu Developers' Summit in Mountain View in November are now online, as well.


Unique Eyebrows

Dear American People,

I guess you'll find businesses selling unique eyebrow designs only in god's own country:

Unique Eyebrows

And what does "unique" mean? Do their customers get two different designs for their two eyebrows? - What a bargain!

Groucho Marx' greasepaint eyebrows are unique, in a way. Maybe that's what they are selling?

Confused,
     Lennart (a worried European)


Photos from GUADEC

The few images with GNOME people I made at GUADEC are now online, too.


Photos from Vilanova/Barcelona

I finally found the time to sort my photos from Vilanova i la Geltrú and Barcelona.

My Windows of Barcelona series:

Windows of Barcelona

A few other nice shots:

Photo #361 Photo #371 Photo #366 Photo #381 Photo #386
Photo #222 Photo #210 Photo #125 Photo #137 Photo #5
Photo #311 Photo #301 Photo #317 Photo #281 Photo #269
Photo #268 Photo #89 Photo #49 Photo #35 Photo #95

These are:
1st row: Casa Milà; dito; dito; dito; dito;
2nd row: Palau de la Música Catalana; dito; Mies van der Rohe Pavilion; dito; Vilanova Lighthouse;
3rd row: Sagrada Família; dito; dito; Hospital de Sant Pau; dito;
4th row: Sagrada Família, seen from Sant Pau; City Center/Barri Gòtic; dito; dito; Plaça Reial

A panoramic view of Barcelona photographed from the Montjuic towards the north:

Barcelona Panorama

Those "thunderclouds" on the right side of the image are actually a result of not using the same exposure settings on all photos that are part of the panorama. Which is a mistake I didn't repeat with my second panoramic view, which again shows Barcelona from the Montjuic, but this time towards the east:

Barcelona Panorama 2

Dont miss the the entire album!

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