“Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it’s ‘worth?’ The only way you’re ever going to extract any value from it is to use it.”

- Paul Graham
Stuff

We recently got back from a visit to Colorado and I had taken a few sets of photos that I intended to stitch into panoramas. This was new to me, but I figured it couldn’t be too hard, right?

With the help of Hugin, I figured right.

There is all sorts of cool tweaks you can do with Hugin, but I’m just going to touch on the basic process. There is a much more complete set of tutorials here.

The process boils down to these steps:

1. Load Images
2. Match Points
3. Tweak Exposure (if you want)
4. Render

Matching Points

Matching points is just a matter of clicking on a recognizable spot in one photo and then the matching spot on the next photo. You don’t have to be spot on, it will guess the right spot for you. Pretty cool. I did about four per photo pair.

Tweak Exposure

I used auto-exposure on my photos and, as a bonus, took a few pictures with direct sunlight. Not good for clean overlaps. Here’s my initial preview image.

Yuck, it’s all washed out and ugly. No problem, we can do some tweaking on the exposure tab and it should be all better.

Render

Once everything is set up, rendering is a snap, it just takes a while.

Enjoy

Once it’s done (not more than a few minutes) you should have your panorama. It’s going to be big though, my un-cropped panorama was 14587×2416 and weighed in at a hefty 19 megs as a high quality JPEG. Wow.

Overall Hugin is a super-easy and fun way to make awesome panoramic photos with any digital camera.

Darcy got a beer kit for her birthday (from her wonderful husband) so we started the process a week or so ago. Not too hard, just boil stuff, stir it and hide it in the dark. I’ll post more once we bottle it.

Darcy Stirred. A Lot.

You can see all the photos here: http://gallery.velvetcache.org/main.php?g2_itemId=20684

Right before we left the chickens gave us a surprise, the first egg!

Needless to say Darcy was very excited, and Gloria was not (we think she’s the layer). By the time we got back we had a half dozen and ate some delicious scrambled eggs for dinner.

Thirty-one days ago I decided to lose some weight.

I haven’t made any huge changes in my diet, just cutting down on how much I eat, when I eat it and what it is. Soda is nearly gone, as are sweet coffee drinks. I no longer graze, and if I do need a snack I lean towards something healthier. For example I started keeping trail mix at work instead of hitting up the vending machine for a candy bar or something.

A month later I’m down about six pounds. It’s not a super smooth curve, but it’s gradual and it’s easy. I’ll keep on trucking, and I need to add some exercise in there, so we’ll see what the next few months hold.