Wrong focus

My goal is to show a clear photograph of the Chicago Cultural Center, without the trees in the foreground obscuring the lower half of the building. It didn't work, because the wrong focal plane got used. I'll be working to fix that on my train time in the next week.

This is the first result of one of the many photographic experiments I kicked off yesterday morning in Millennium Park in Chicago. Here we have the combined exposure of 21 frames into a single image. This is called Synthetic Aperture Photography, a part of Computational Photography which I'm currently exploring.

I was inspired by the work of Mark Levoy of Stanford. I first became aware of his work through this interview with Robert Scoble on PodTech.

I used a development snapshot of Hugin / Enfuse which I got from Panospace. The automatic results worked... as you can see, it's not the focused on the Chicago Cultural Center... which was my intended target.

I'll keep adding data points, and moving the focus to the proper place... but it's encouraging to know that it'll eventually work.

This wouldn't have happened without blogs, and the web. It was possible before all of this, but far less likely. The velocity with which science and experimentation can happen is increasing because of this, and other advances in knowledge sharing. It's a great ride!