Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Sitting at the Dock of . . .


I get a lot of questions about these Wee Planet images, especially about how I do it and when I do it.  As to how, it's actually a bit complicated.  There's a decent tutorial here, though it's a bit outdated, involves more computer programming than I'm used to, and you'll probably have to make the Google your best friend to figure it out.   Basically, you stand in one spot, take a picture of everything you can see (including the sky above and the ground below), and then stitch all of those pictures together to make an equirectangular panorama (pretty much a flat, rectangular panoramic image).  That image will be a distorted mess, but you can then do some computing magic (I use a program called Hugin) to turn that panorama into a stereographic projection, which gives you a 360x180 degree view from the place you were standing.  In the above image, I was standing at the end of the dock.  I stitched together about 25 shots to get this image.  As to when I do these, I usually cram it in between midnight and 7am -- hobby time.  It's kind of fun trying to get these right, and, when they're done right (which I'm still trying to achieve), I think they're really interesting images.