Happy New Year

My New Year's wish for all of us is that 2022 should be less covidiotic than 2021.

I have been taking fewer pics of late because of having been busy translating history books by Mark Solonin (published and on Amazon) and Viktor Suvorov (translation completed and going to publishers).

I thought it might interest some to hear how the above picture was made. Following an end-of-year upgrade to my photo processing software (CaptureOne), it now offers panorama stitching as a function. This picture was my first (and so far only) experiment. The day was lovely so I stepped out of our front door, walked 10 steps and took a number of pictures, about 5 overlapping pics running across from left to right with mostly sky and a bit of sea and then another 5 of mostly sea with just a touch of sky. Algorithms are so good this days that all one has to do is present the app with such a set of pictures and it works out how to stitch them together.

This is what I gave the app:

after which it trundled for a couple of minutes, working out where each pic belonged and then producing my panorama for post-processing.

---

I also did another experiment. Because I know only have a very wide-angled fixed lens (28mm), elements in long views can be very small indeed. But my camera also has a shitload of pixels (47 million of them, to be precise), making it possible to crop to enlarge. There was a beautiful dawn the other day and I took this picture.

Nice, but nothing special. (I haven't troubled to develop it with any care). Particularly striking, as William and enjoyed the view and a morning cigarette, was the sky and the light on the boats. However, those elements were hardly visible in the full frame image. This called for a quick 'crop-to-zoom)

I therefore cropped down to the bit of the picture I liked

and processed that to the best of my ability. Despite the really heavy crop, this picture could be printed as a 9"×9" at 300px/in.

So there we go. Sorry for boring my way out of the old year.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!