Parramatta Centenary square

From the Better late than never desk: A couple of photos from Parramatta's Centenary Square (formerly known as Church Street Mall), taken around Christmas.




Another attempt at HDR


For the artsy fartsy inclined: Colorful Xmas tree in an otherwise b/w Centenary Square


Panorama image created from 10 individual photos, stitched together with the help of Hugin.

Rhine Falls

At just 23 meters (75 feet), the Rhine Falls are by no means the highest waterfalls. The Swiss Alps alone feature numerous falls that are much higher and, for that matter, probably look more impressive. Still, thanks to a flow rate ranging from 250,000 liters / second (winter) to 600,000 liters / second (summer), these falls are regarded as the "biggest" in Europe.

And that makes them worthy of a couple of photos:




HDR image by Luminance


Panorama image by Hugin

For visitor information, please check out the Rhine Falls official website.

Fixing wide-angle distortions with Hugin

Note: Hugin is a free cross-platform image processing tool, so this may be of interest to you even if you're using Windows or Mac.

Hugin is best known as a great tool to create panorama images from multiple photos; after all, the full title of the software product is Hugin – Panorama photo stitcher.

Another, not so widely known use of the same application is correcting distortions of wide-angle photos. When shooting with a wide-angle lens, you invariably end up with vertical lines leaning back, leaning to the side, or even "falling in" on the observer. While this keystone effect can enhance the impact of an photograph and is sometimes consciously included in the composition of an image for artistic effect, it often simply distracts the viewer, when you simply want to show a building or a city street "as is" and are using a wide-angle lens purely for practical purposes.

There's an extensive tutorial on the subject on the Hugin website, on which I've based my tests and the following notes.

The process of correcting those "falling" vertical lines essentially includes 2 basic steps:
1) Define lines that are supposed to be perpendicular
2) Distort the image so that these defined lines actually become perpendicular

Let's do this with this image:


1) Load the image into Hugin, just as you would load any sequence of photos to create a panorama image.


2) Set the control points. This is where you spend most of your time, this is the step that takes some real, manual work.

Make sure that Auto add is set. To start with, make sure Zoom is set to fit to window (you may need to temporarily change this to 100 % in order to get the exact positioning of some control points perfectly right).

To set the control points, pick a vertical feature in the left copy of the image and set a control point at one end. Then, set the corresponding control point at the other end of that vertical feature in the right copy of the image.

Ideally, you define your vertical features spread over the whole image, from left to right, and both in the top and the bottom section. This will allow Hugin to correctly calculate the correct distortion for the whole image; if you only define vertical lines in the left half of the image, Hugin has no way of knowing that there are also vertical lines in the right half, leaning in a different direction.


3) Click the Optimize button


This will, well, optimize your control points. When done, apply the result of the optimization process:


4) Open the Fast preview window:


5) In the Projection tab, set projection type to Rectilinear.


6) In the Crop tab, drag the boundaries to adjust the crop area.


7) Create the corrected image. Since Hugin's primary function is to stitch multiple photos together to create panorama images, the final step of the process is called Stitch even though with only 1 image, you don't actually have anything to stitch together.

With that in mind, switch to the Stitch tab, make sure that Projection is set to Rectilinear, and click the Stitch button to let Hugin do its magic.


There you have it; one wide-angle picture with perfectly perpendicular vertical lines:


Below are some more examples;

Parramatta Panorama

Yes, I'm still playing around with panorama images, creating composite pictures from multiple photographs. This one consists of 14 individual shots, taken in two horizontal rows. Although I took the photos without the help of a tripod, on my little Canon Powershot S90, Hugin managed to get a "good fit" to generate the composite image.

Considering the many moving objects (people, traffic), the result isn't too bad, apart from the odd headless / legless pedestrian, and maybe a slightly shortened bus.

The picture generated by Hugin then received the full Photoshop (well, GIMP, actually) treatment, including Unsharp Mask, color level adjustment, color saturation boost, etc.

And then, you end up with something like this:

The Wolverine in Parramatta

Apparently a scene for The Wolverine is going to be filmed in Parramatta this weekend. And indeed, the corner of Smith and George Streets is being transformed into "downtown Japan".





And while I'm at it, just because I can, a composite image of Smith Street. This picture is composed of 10 photos (2 rows of 5), stitched together in Hugin.

Mt Matterhorn

A short time-lapse video, and a couple of pictures from the Mt. Matterhorn region, Switzerland:


Clouds over Mount Matterhorn

The Gorner glacier, seen from Gorner Grat

A train of the Gornergrat Railway in front of Mount Matterhorn

View of Mt Matterhorn, from Gorner Grat

Panorama view from Gorner Grat

Mount Matterhorn, seen from Zermatt

The peak of Mt Matterhorn