Greg and Kat's blog

Facebook: not just for stalking anymore. It’s amazing the things you can learn while bumping around Facebook.

One of the things I recently learned was that the feather duster is the preferred implement for Chinese child whoopin’. (Apparently you hold the feathery-end and whop them with the stick part. The more you know.)

So having come across that new stereotype, I had to go hunting for others. Sure enough, I started to notice a trend among the many photos I had seen.

Here’s my new stereotype: Asian people take a lot of pictures of women standing beside flowers. [Most of the links below are to Facebook pictures, so your enjoyment of this post may be impaired by not being in the SFU network, or not having a Facebook account at all if you’re a complete loser, Eugene.]

Let’s start with some clear examples of the genre. We have Nicola in Hawaii and Jessica, a former 120 student, went to a tulip festival. That last one might be too easy to count.

I’m not sure that this one of Eunice can be included, she’s not much of a good-Asian-girl, but there are flowers in the background. Check.

Daniela, while not Asian herself, was in Thailand for her flowers-and-tree picture, so I’m counting it.

Suyoko inherited her obsession with the garden from her father (the Japanese half). There are also thousands of pictures of him with various plants hidden away somewhere.

On the family side, I have a picture of Pam in the back yard and one of their Ama. I’m sure I have seen a Kat-with-flowers picture, but can’t locate it at the moment. Kat’s experience is “we don’t want to waste the film on just the flowers… go stand beside the flowers so we can get a picture of them.”

Finally, just to show that it’s not an exclusively-Asian phenomenon, here’s Sara and some kind of flowering tree.

I recently acquired a KingPANO panoramic tripod head. For those who don’t know, a panoramic head is a jig that forces your camera to rotate around the len’s nodal point, so you can rotate your camera and get images that can be stitched together nicely.

Basically, panoramas of far-away things are easy, since an inch or two of movement isn’t a big deal, but close-up panoramas are impossible without such a device. Have a look at the panorama I did at UNC. The far-away buildings are just fine, but the flowerbeds closer to the camera have awkward seams because of camera movement.

My first project with the pano head was a full 360×180° panorama in my office.

Since a few people have asked, and I have the pictures around, I thought I’d show what happens. First, the camera goes on the tripod, exposure, focus, and white-balance are set to manual (so they stay the same for all images). Then, I take a bunch of pictures (about 60 in this case, but that’s probably more overlap than necessary) like this:

Then, into a panorama-stitching program (Hugin for me). I usually scale everything 50% before hitting Hugin. I didn’t this time and my poor computer groaned under the stress.

Then comes the long (but somehow relaxing) process of identifying corresponding points in the pictures. That lets the program figure out each picture’s correct place in the panorama. Once that’s done, each picture is morphed into the right “shape” for the finished panorama:

Now, the individual images just have to be piled on top of each other for the finished panorama:

Finally, I get the finished panorama of my office (after some pain to remove the tripod and fill in the floor properly).

If I had kept the full resolution all the way though, the finished panorama would have been about 162 megapixels. The one you see on the link above is about 3.5% of that.

I decided I should make better use of my camera. Perhaps it was a New Year’s resolution.

Anyway, I have gone out the last two Saturdays looking for stuff to put in front of my camera. I took a few pictures around, but I’m going to concentrate on the panoramas because I think they’re neat.

Last Saturday was close to home. I started by going up to SFU. I did a full 360° panorama in the AQ (drag around the panoramas to scroll).

Then, I went down to Burnaby Mountain Park. I set up the tripod again and did another 360° among the totem poles.

They day was pretty overcast, so there aren’t exactly any spectacular colours in those, but they aren’t bad.

This week, it was overcast again, so I went downtown to a camera shop. On the way back, I put on my sunglasses. Then I though “hey, sunglasses mean sun!” Sun means light and light means colour.

So, I cranked onto the highway and went to the most obvious place in the city to take a panorama: the Cypress lookout. I got a nice panorama from the lookout, and it even managed to stitch together without much lens flare, which was nice since I wasn’t carrying my lens hood.

I think the last panorama was my favourite. I drive around the north side of Capitol Hill, took the road as far as it goes, parked, and set off on-foot into some kind of mini-port that’s there for the Chevron refinery.

I found a good place and took a panorama facing north towards the Burrard Inlet. It’s a neat viewpoint: the light is good and the water/mountains/sky effect is good. And there’s this weird overgrown houseboat lookin’ thing sitting there.

I showed the picture to Kat who remembered a floating McDonalds at Expo 86 that looked a lot like that. Sure enough, that boat is the remains of the McBarge (!). I found some more McBarge info out there too.