Out of This World

[compilerbitch]

This was shot last weekend in Mendocino. There's something a little odd about it though...

Comments

[joedecker.livejournal.com]

Heh. At least one pair of twins and another set of triplets. ;)

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Must be the sea air! :-)

[erming.livejournal.com]

People walking?

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Identical people walking...

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

The image was put together from about 60 separate frames, 16 megapixels each. Most were alternate versions of the view up the road that I shot over roughly an hour on Sunday morning. I combined them all in Photoshop CS2 (1.75GB psd file, anyone?). It wasn't easy, and took quite a few hours. I was very careful to keep the scene looking normal enough to be plausible, but just *enough* wrong to make people double-take. Obviously it worked!

As an exercise, you might like to count the doseybats... she's second from the left on the crosswalk, if you don't know what she looks like.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

That is incredibly well done. Impressive.
Now that I know what to look for, the shadow of the woman at the very front is a little too black and hard, for example compared to the car's shadow on her left.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Indeed, there are a few subtle things. I will probably have another go at it sometime soon to iron them out. The lighting did change noticeably between the first and last shots, so that, coupled with the fact that I haven't always faked shadows that should probably be there, is all that gives it away. Maybe after a couple more hours with the graphics tablet... :-)

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

PS: The original is about 8000x4000 and is still pretty sharp at 100%, so even the big version here loses quite a bit of detail. I've not printed it yet, but it should be interesting to give it a try later! :-)

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

WTF? How on Earth...

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Hee hee.

[lenkline.livejournal.com]

Wow! Very well done shots and processed! At first I was like why are people crossing into the cars.. It's self-titled, 'Out of This World'. Maybe you were hanging letters onto that place. :)

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

The shop is really there, it's not faked at all actually. In reality, it sells telescopes. :-) The name did give me the idea for the project, though. I might well have another go with the same technique in some other places.

what's wrong?

[ichae.livejournal.com]

My first thought was... "Somebody - maybe everybody - if breaking some kind of law..." A car is sitting halfway in the intersection, making other people walk behind them. Pedestrians are crossing the street outside the crosswalk, with utter disregard for the traffic, and likewise cars are acting like the pedestrians aren't there.

Oh... it's multiple exposures? Never mind...

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

I missed it, I'm afraid; the thing that struck me was the odd apparent angle of the buildings, though this might be an illusion caused by enormous camber on the road. I wondered if it was somewhere that had had earthquake-related subsidence.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

The geometry of the buildings is out a bit partly because it's such a wide angle, and partly because I wasn't quite careful enough setting up the camera. I'd forgotten to bring my trusty $3.99 Walmart spirit level with me. What I *should* have done is set up the camera, level the tripod exactly, then frame the image vertically using the vertical shift on my shift lens, then took the left and right edge images with horizontal shifts, then put the horizontal setting back to zero and proceeded with the (70 or so!) centre frames. As it was, I also wanted a slightly wider image than I could get from shifts alone, so I basically went to maximum shift in each direction and turned the camera through about 3 or 4 degrees. Generally this isn't noticeable, but I might have overdone it slightly. I think it was worth it though to get the name of the shop on the left in frame, which was the thing that gave me the idea in the first place. In reality, the shop is actually there, I didn't fake it. It actually sells telescopes. :-)

I'll know another time. :-)

[pinguhateseng.livejournal.com]

Beats my multiple images hands down! Dead impressive...very subtle.....

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

What I was trying for is having it look sufficiently plausible that it takes quite a while to work out what's going on. I wanted it to look initially like an ordinary street scene, then cause a 'er, hang on a bit!' in someone's head when the not-rightness sets in.

[void150.livejournal.com]

That really is impressive! Well done!

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :-)

[dave-t-lurker.livejournal.com]

Very nicely done!

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Thanks. :-)

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

I ran into a link to Autostitch today, it seemed like the sort of thing you might have fun with (or be in a position to slag off in a fun manner).

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

It looks pretty impressive, actually. It's probably not for me for a couple of reasons -- I prefer to manually paint the connections between the images if I'm stitching a panorama, because automatic software often gets things wrong if you have a moving object in frame that is in a different position in each case. This happens a lot, even with landscapes (wind blows trees and other vegetation around quite a bit, even if it isn't very strong). The second reason is their licensing terms -- I don't want *any* third-party licenses applied to my photos because of any hardware or software I might have used to create them. It would just make me feel a bit icky, and of course if I ever wanted to do something with the image it would make it impractical. For now, I think I'll probably stick to the image stitching in Photoshop and live with that. It's not ideal, it often stuffs up more complex things (and even a lot of simple things), and I usually need to tweak it's output a bit. But, the results are very good (if a bit laborious to get to), and no one expects me to say 'tweaked with Photoshop' or some such! :-)

As for the demo image on the site, I was very impressed that it managed to assemble that particular motley collection of images without help -- Photoshop would *never* have managed it, and it would probably have taken several days to correct its mistakes by hand. I thought the final image looked a bit off, though -- really quite blurred and quite uneven colour and exposure, not generally what I'd expect from the enormous resolution that stitched panos should really give you. I'm wondering if the algorithm does a bit of deliberate messing up of the image to cover its tracks somewhat.

For myself, if I wanted to do a pano like that, if I was using my Bronica I'd use the shift lens and take a left/middle/right series of frames using only the horizontal shift whilst keeping the camera locked down on a tripod. This trick basically guarantees that the pano will stitch perfectly, because there is no perspective distortion from frame to frame whatsoever. Or, assuming I could actually carry the damned thing far enough to get it into position, I'd just shoot the scene with my 4x5 with a wide angle lens and the Better Light back.

Actually, Better Light make a pano device that attaches between the tripod and the camera, which is basically a stepper motor driven rotator on a high quality bearing. The way it works, the linear CCD moves to dead centre of the back then stays there, and the rotator sweeps the entire camera through whatever angle you choose. I don't have one, mostly because they are a bit pricey for something I'd so rarely actually use, but they do produce some interesting results. You can get mindboggling resolution out of it, though -- like 40000 x 6000! Apparently, the limit tends to be set by how large an image you can actually get into Photoshop without having it keel over rather than by the camera. I had thought about hiring one sometime just out of interest.