O Canada!

While I was in Canada back in April, one of places we went was to the top of Mt. Doug. From there, I took bunches of pictures. Many of these were of my friends. Some more were shots that I took by standing in one spot, snapping off a shot, then rotating slightly, snapping off another shot, and continuing until I had gone 180 or 360 degrees. My theory was that I could later splice these images together into a single panoramic shot, much the way I'd seen boingdragon do.

Me being who I am, I didn't get around to this for quite some time. When I finally did, I discovered that it was even trickier than I'd anticipated.

I had realized that, since I didn't have a tripod, I would be taking each picture at slightly different heights, and with a fair amount of overlap on each one. So I expected to have some trouble lining them up. What I hadn't realized is that I'd also be taking each picture as slightly different distances -- this picture might be a little closer to the horizon than the next one, and so on. So I'd have to shrink the closer one a bit to make the scales match.

Also ... the exposures varied. Wildly. Each shot would be noticeably and markedly brighter, darker, bluer, whatever, than the adjacent ones. At first, I didn't think that I could fix that -- then I realized that my paint program is called PHOTOpaint for a reason, and that it does have tools for adjusting hue, saturation, intensity, contrast, brightness, etc.

What it doesn't have, as far as I know, is any way to automate this process so that the computer will change picture alignment, scales, and colors for me. Kirzen said that he had software for this, but since I am me and therefore stubborn in stupid ways, I spent time eyeballing all of this on my own and putting it together.
( The results! )

PS

Oh, and I replaced a couple of icons. I figure I should start replacing my icons periodically, so that as I get older it's not such a shock to my LJ readers. The new ones were from pictures taken a year ago, so not really recent, but at least closer.

Of course, I really should've replaced the seven-year-old Glamour Shots photos first, but I so like that one over-the-shoulder pose .... :D

And I didn't know LJ was handing out another 5 icons to paid users for no additional charge. Woo! Maybe I'll take some new pictures to upload, and cover some additional emotions, like "depressed" and "confused".