It's been a long time since I did some tripod photography, here's an HDR photo of "The Bean" at sunrise.

Sometimes an experiment works out well... this is one of those times. I'm VERY pleased with this photo. It is a stack of day and night images composited into this view. You can see the lights on, and the reflections of the city lights in the water. It's a bit surrealist, and kind of fun.

I hope you like it as well.

Hunting for a photo

Ansel Adams would often revisit places, and a curator of one of his exhibitions stated that he "hunted" a photo across time. I feel myself doing the same thing.

A few days ago, on a whim I followed one of my friends off the train at the Van Buren exit in Chicago. I then took this photograph.



I've been revisiting the location as I can, looking for something, I'm not sure what....   Today I met Rachel on my quest, and she was kind enough to pose for this photograph, which still needs a bit of tweaking.



I'm still not sure what it is I'm trying to find, but the quest continues.

Windows Live Writer – First post

I didn’t even know I had it installed on my laptop, but here it is… Windows Live Writer.

I’m seeing what it can do.

Here’s a photo I took yesterday.

Lion03

Lion03
Originally uploaded by --Mike--

Synthetic focus (aka the "Warot Method") continues to be fun. Here is a nice shot of the Lion with a Blackhawks helmet.

How I gave up on x-ray vision, and ended up taking pretty pictures instead.

I first became interested when they photos showed the magic ability to see through objects, like the fabled x-ray glasses that populated the backs of comic books in the old days. The researchers at Stanford had actually shown the ability to look through things, though not totally opaque, but close enough. I wanted to learn how it was done, and once I read enough, I resolved to do it myself.

I didn't have the budget, nor the staff, nor the gear... I did have a willingness to experiment, willingness to give it a try, just to see what happened. The first results were interesting, but not what I had hoped for. The focus was on the wrong items, and I learned that it was going to be a fairly manual operation to get things to work right. But with time and practice, my technique improved, and I was able to slowly replicate what took hundreds of cameras and and the work of a few graduate students.

Here is my first result... I managed to see through the trees!

Over time, the ability to see through things lost it's attraction, because it was far easier to just look around something, rather than spend hours after the fact, not knowing if it would even pan out. The experimentation continued, however... and I got some interesting results along the way.

I kept discovering new effects, and new ways of looking at things, including time itself. My interests moved and transformed into something else, the ability to create photographs that would showcase a single object in a frame, with that nice soft focus only achievable in practice with a very large and heavy camera that I could never afford, nor successfully carry.

I wrote about my work on my blog, and posted photos on Flickr, and got some attention. It was enough to keep plugging away at it, learning the tradeoffs involved in order to get the creamy soft focus I really wanted.

I'm now at the point where I think I've got the technical part of it all set, and the artistic choices are going to be the main influencer at this point. I've demonstrated and experimented enough... now I just want pretty photos.

If you find yourself impressed with something, be like me... see if you can figure out how to do it within the limitations you have... you might achieve your goal, or you might just invent something interesting and beautiful along the way.

Virtual Focus photography on the Blue Line

I took some photos yesterday of the CTA Blue Line station at Division and Milwaukee in Chicago, Illinois yesterday afternoon. Later in the day, and this morning, I decided where the focus of those photos should be, thanks to synthetic focus.

You can see a brief slideshow showing the 5 different results here. This is one of them.

Since the focus can be determined post exposure, it's interesting to see what new things I can pick out that might have been missed while I was busy managing the camera.

Opening day

Picasso
Originally uploaded by --Mike--

Due to weather, today is Opening Day in Chicago.

Adding value - looking for balance in photography

Here is an example of added value... done after giving the family all of the raw photos from the Baptism. It took a few train trips worth of effort to get these three panoramas stitched, and did require some manual editing.







The reason I gave them the raw photos was one of simple expediency, and to hedge against the possibility of the task of delivering them falling off my to-do list. I'm not as happy with this as I thought I would be.

The first reason is that I take a LOT of photos... 1202 at a baby shower on Saturday, and 900 at the Baptism and other associated events on Sunday. This means that I've given the task of reviewing that many essentially random photos to families that have other things to do.

The second reason I've come to realize lately is that I don't get feedback... I really need to find out what people like, so I can give them more of that, and less stuff they don't care about. It's impossible to learn without feedback.

The last reason is one of adding value which is kind of a merge of the others... I want to make the photographs a gift of value... not just a pile of snaps. I want to help people make memories they will cherish through their years, and be able to share with others. I can't do that alone.

Computational Imaging - experiments to date

I've been experimenting with doing things with a stack of images, some of it is virtual focus, some of it synthetic aperture, and some of it involving multiple image layering (aka "multisync"). This seems to have generated an audience who wishes to know more, so I'm writing this in response. Please feel free to add questions in the comments, and I'll answer as precisely as I can.

Multisync

The first thing to discuss is what I call "multisync" for lack of a better term. Suggestions for a better term for this would be greatly appreciated. A "multisync" photo is simply a set of photos layered to show (or hide) a subject across multiple moments in time. A tripod makes it relatively trival to do so. Here's one of my personal favorites:




Here you see Virginia at 2 years old, clearly walking towards a goal. At the time I had something like this in mind, but when the opprotunity presented itself, it was a quck rush to get into position and holding down the shutter to get a continous stream of photos. The results were amazing to me. It's not often that something truely original results from an experiment, but this time I feel like it did.

I didn't have a tripod at the time, so the images were all taken with slightly different angles. I used Hugin to align them, because that is the tool I feel most comfortable with. It's a matter of trading time post-exposure for pre-exposure setup. I'm very happy with this particular trade.

Synthetic aperture

Once I learned about synthetic aperture, I was hooked. This is the thing that got me started on this thread of experimentation. I still tip my hat to Marc Levoy for his work and demos that got me interested.

The basic idea is to trade your time and effort to replace a very large lens to create your own short depth of field. Here's an example:



The basic process is can be reduced to these basic steps:

• take a lot of almost identical photos from slightly different positions
• spend minutes or hours manually adding control points using Hugin
• output the remapped images to a series of TIFF formattted images
• average the results using a python script written for the purpose

I took this set of photos while standing near the Marshall Fields clock at State and Randolph in Chicago, Illinois. I took the pictures while moving left and right and forwards and backwards covering an area of a circle approximately 1 meter in diameter if I recall correctly.

Again, here I use Hugin to trade off pre-exposure alignment for time post exposure. However, in the case of virtual focus, it's pretty much impossible to align things pre-exposure. I imported the photos into Hugin, and chose 4 points on the face as alignment points and allowed Hugin to optimize for Roll, Pitch, Yaw, Zoom and X/Y offset. I'm pleased with the results, though I do wonder how many photos it would take to get a creamy bokeh.

Virtual Focus

Another way to combine photos is to take them from widely varying locations, to create images that would otherwise be impossible to capture using film, because it combines photos taken non-continous locations.

Here is a good example of an otherwise impossible shot using multiple exposures taken while receeding from the subject at 30+ miles per hour:



The compression of distance as the magnification becomes greater to keep the relative size shows so very interesting artifacts in the photo, and in fact I use this shot to help explain the process to others who commute with me.

Hugin - The Process

The process is pretty simple, if tedious. Import all of your exposures into Hugin, using the Images tab to avoid the auto-alignment process. Then manually enter control points between image pairs that are in your desired plane of focus.

Once you've gotten enough points entered and you've managed to optimize the error to an acceptable level (I try to get below 1 pixel of error), you then use the following option on the Stitcher tab:

Output : Remapped images

In remapper options I turn off the "saved cropped images" because my script can't handle them cropped. You then tell it to stitch now, and it will ask for a prefix, I always use the underscore character _ because it's easy to remember.

I usually then run the resulting image through one of the scripts I've written to average the frames. Lately, I use trail.py a lot, because it shows all of the intermediate steps. Here is a listing of the script:

import os, sys
import fnmatch
import Image

mask = sys.argv[1]
count = 0

# Program to average a set of photos, producing merge.jpg as a result
#
# version 0.01
# Michael Warot
#

print mask  
for file in os.listdir('.'):
  if fnmatch.fnmatch(file, mask):
      print file
      count = count + 1
      in2 = Image.open(file)
      if count == 1:
          in1 = in2
      in1 = Image.blend(in1,in2,(1.0/count))
      in1.save("trail"+str(count)+".jpg","JPEG")
in1.save("merge.jpg","JPEG")      

You need to be warned that this script overwrites the output files without asking, so be careful. It also requires the python image library, which might not be installed by default.

Once done, you'll have a set of jpeg images which show the intermediate results, along with merge.jpg which is the average of all frames.

Summary
So, I hope this has been of help. Please feel free to ask additional questions, or point out errors or omissions. Thanks for your time and attention.

Chicago Bean Panorama - Prints Available

Now available, limited edition xerographic prints of this picture

Thanks to this special offer, you too can own a limited edition xerographic print on heavy stock.

This edition is limited to 10,000 prints, each signed by the artist. Overall size is 17 x 11 inches, approxmate image size is 16.7 x 5.8 inches.

Thanks to Hugh at Gaping Void for the idea.

Post 9/11 photography on the CTA - Entirely Reasonable

I was taking some photos on the Red Line of the Chicago Transit Authority today, and I was told politely that I would need to get permission. So I put the camera away... and decided to see what's involved in getting permission. The response was one which I'm quite happy with, as a photographer, passenger, and Citizen of the United States.

I rode the Green Line to the LindenClinton stop and walked over to CTA headquarters. Ms Kelley in customer service was very nice and polite in determining who should handle my inquiry. The lobby on the second floor features a nice Neon sculpture I hope to photograph some day.

After a short wait I was greeted by Ron Grazian Jr., who is the Planning Coordinator for Operations Oversight. He explained the situation to me, and gathered information from me about the nature and purpose of my photography. He gave me a copy of the policy document they use for their staff, which will probably prove helpfull at some point in the future. He also made the quite valid point that they have 11,000 employees who may or may not know the fine details of their policy.

The policy itself is quite reasonable, leaving things to the discretion of their employees, which is probably the most sane approach to things they could have possibly done. I'm very impressed with the professionalism and thoughfullness of the CTA.

In discussing why I take photos, and what I do with them, I was surprised that Ron had not heard of Flickr, so told him about the site, and gave him a link to my photostream. We both learned some things, time well spent.

All in all, a 5 Star experience. No hiding behind a set of rules, or anything of that nature, just real 1:1 conversation. 

Thanks Ron!

Running from the Coyote

My Around the Coyote submission was rejected. 8(

I've decided to see who else is writing about the same thing.

It seems to be a lot smaller this year.

166437 and counting

I've managed to gather all of my photos from the last 11 years in one disk, and I've got 166,437 distinct Jpeg files, plus some movies in AVI and MPG, and a few NEF files. WOW

Mellon Collie

I got a nice spiffy new hard drive to gather all my photos together on... only to find out that I may have lost a few years worth due to inadequate backups... ugh, I'm feeling a bit of Melancholia.

My main task now is to fight through this, and try to recover what I can. Ugh!

Update: I have all of them in a lower resolution format... good enough for small prints... still working on getting the originals back.

Dead D40... ugh!

My Nikon D40 just died... it has only taken about 29000 photos since I bought it after Thanksgiving... this really sucks! I've contacted support, and will be sending it in on Monday.

The shutter is fubar... when you turn it on it says

! Error: Press shutter
release button again.


Oh well... time to dig out the Coolpix 8800 and get the batteries charged.

Railroad Signals

Here's a video showing the individual frames that went in to this.

Virtual Focus - An Introduction

This is my first try at demoing virtual focus, to explain a bit about what you actually see when you're looking at one of the photos.

I took 40 photos, moving a about 3 foot to the left after each one. I then used the latest Windows beta of Hugin to align them. I then average the photos to generate the final image, which is then cropped to taste.

Synthetic Aperture Photography with Hugin - an introduction

I found this by a very circuitous route:

I don't think this is from a single shot. The work of Mark Levoy and
the other Computational Photography people use many, many shots and
"choose" the rays they'd like from the large, virtual aperture created
by moving the camera. What I'd like to know is, how is he "choosing"
the focal plane in this setup?

It also appears to be distinct from Tufuse, which uses focus-bracketed
shots (this technique does not require focus bracketed shots).

Hopefully he does a more comprehensive writeup detailing his
technique, or someone here has a little more info.

Daniel Reetz

So.. here's how I do it (and why)...

I use Hugin, a program which is designed to stitch panoramas for it's ability to precisely remap photographs to fit into the same plane in 3 dimensions. It's a short cut to avoid a lot of programming and debugging that I'd rather not due for what was to be a simple experiment to satisfy my curiosity.

The use of Hugin also means that I don't have all of the nice equations and things which can precisely do what I want to be able to do next.. dynamically move the focus plane. I may go there, and do the grunt work for this and other reasons.... but not right now.

The general point of it all is to generate a virtual focal plane which allows the combining of several views into a new coherent composite. This has the benefit of forcing anything not in the focal plane out of focus, and into the bokeh of the photo.



I saw this window on my way to work last Wednesday. I thought it would be interesting to try the technique to see how well it worked at getting rid of the annoying chains while still showing the merchandise. I took several photos being sure to move in both the horizontal and vertical directions while keeping the same distance from the window.

I then used Hugin to manually place pairs of "control points" on the drawing on the notepad on the left display. I then told Hugin to allow each image to have it's own X and Y offset to compensate for the motion of the camera. (The feature was originally added to help stitch together scanned images, but turns out to be quite usable for my purposes as well)

Once you've entered a sufficient number of control point pairs, you can then have the program optimize the merge parameters and output a series of images which are all remapped to be blended into a panorama.

I then take the results, use Paint Shop Pro to combine them into a layered image, and set the transparency of each layer to result in the average pixel value of all layers.

I've done this with 10 frames taken a bit closer to the window shown above, and you can see it as a slide show.





I hope this answers your questions, and gives others a bit of a jumping off point.

Pritzker Pavilion on a cold winter's day

This is from the same cold morning on the 13th as all of the other photos. The sky was a clear magic blue. Next time I need to use a tripod and plan out the edges better.