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May 23rd, 2009 - Wide-eyed at the MN Master Nats Conference



Heh. Having a little fun with the auditorium view of the Master Naturalist's Conference last weekend at the Audubon Center of the Northwoods in Sandstone, MN. (click image for larger view)
The top one is four vertical frames stitched together, the bottom is three horizontal frames, both from the 18mm zoom lens. Day one of the conference. I love their stained glass windows.
Note in the pincushion shot, up in the very corners of the ceiling and along the seam, the little beige "pillows" tacked to the wall. I never could figure out what those were for. Anyone know...?

4 comments:

buthidae said...

Panos with moving targets? You must have shot very rapidly. They look good.

I can only offer a guess about the "pillows". They don't appear to have to do with lighting, sound or ventilation. Maybe they are covers on retrofitted electrical work? Or part of an alarm system? Or there just to test the powers of observation among the Naturalists?

mnainfochair@gmail.com said...

Yeah, you can see some movement and splicing without looking too hard, but I was pretty happy and surprised with the results.
They were both hand-held, the top one was a 1/60th flash-sync with a camera-mounted "big" flash, bottom one was natural light something like 125th at 5.6, I think.
I have my auto ISO set up so that it has max sensitivity of 800 ISO, and min shutter speed of 1/125th sec. Sometimes I shoot that as auto, or a fixed 250 ISO. These were using that custom auto.

There were many theories about the pillows: insect control, covering hidden microphones, acoustic dampening... I don't know. But I WILL find out...

buthidae said...

Hand held makes them doubly impressive. What do you use to stitch together the panos?

mnainfochair@gmail.com said...

I use "PhotoStitch" software that came with my little Canon G2 Powershot. I'm pretty impressed with it. It's old though, I should see if they have an upgrade, there's a few more things it could do. I have done some massive images with it though, and between that and Paint Shop Pro XI, they have come out amazingly well.

The hand-hand wasn't exactly perfect, but i try to fix a point of reference and include that in each shot if I don't have a tripod.

The top shot I used the "wide-angle" feature of the software which stretches the pincushion a bit, then shopped the jagged edges of the top and bottom out further with an elliptical selection mask.
- T.