2011-02-23
post/3466211396
A couple of weeks ago, Anne mentioned that she had bought the Ladybird Book Of London. I’ve had a copy since I was a child, so I thought I’d upload a few quick photos of some of the spreads in the book. Enjoy.
2011-02-16
post/3329878067
As the caption at the New York Times slideshow of best of breed dogs puts it: Ziggy the Puli, 4 years old. Registered as “Cordmaker Rumpus Bumpus.” Owned by Jackie Beaudoin. Photograph: Fred Conrad. (via Cynthia.)
2010-08-25
post/1009199176
I’ve been using Autostitch iPhone a lot this summer. It makes it easy to combine shots and so makes wide-angle panoramic photos a possibility, despite the fixed field of view of the phone’s camera. (You can see an cropped example, of Tromsø from the Hurtigruten coastal steamer, on Flickr. Above is the raw image that the phone produced.)
However, not all of my photos are with the iPhone, and so I need a desktop equivalent too. So I downloaded four Mac panorama stitchers and ran some photos I had previously stitched on the phone together.
Annoyingly, despite all costing at least ten times as much, they (with one exception) all performed far worse. Calico Panorama at least managed to get everything in the right place, and smoothed out the variations in exposure (which are unavoidable without manual controls). AutoPano Pro was also competent, but that UI is eyebleedingly awful. PTgui also did fairly well, but DoubleTake was clearly completely confused.
I also tried PhotoStitch, which was bundled with the Canon PowerShot S90 I recently bought. It needed to be told what the alignment was, and crashed after producing a version that was worse even than DoubleTake’s attempt. Poor show.
I suspect I’ll try a few more sets of images in Calico before deciding whether or not to stump up the cash, but there seems to be a wider lesson here. A piece of $2 software with barely any UI feels more able to do its job than a variety of desktop applications costing anywhere from $20 to $80, and it’s making me consider rethinking my workflow just to take advantage of it.
2009-07-14
post/141395582
I’ve posted a set at Flickr of photos covering a part of the Barbican highwalk system, which is by far the largest remaining part of the City of London’s scheme. This covers the path from Moorgate tube station to the Barbican Arts Centre, along Moorfields Highwalk. the stub of Britannic Highwalk, Willoughby Highwalk and Brandon Mews, Speed Highwalk, Cromwell Highwalk and Frobisher Crescent.
After the image-free first few posts, hopefully this gives you an idea of what the system looks like these days.
(This post is about the City of London Highwalks. You might want to check the introductory post for a list of related stories.)
A little contextual footnote. I previously published the same images as two Tumblr photosets (since removed), but I didn’t really like the way they were presented either as Flash or as HTML. I think I’m happier publishing on Flickr - where they’re accessible as single images - and using the embedded slideshow player to bring them over here. Apologies for the duplication of content, though.
