Mike’s Blog

Yet another nice afternoon in one of the many parks in London.




Click here to see the image gallery.

Whatever I will write here isn’t going to change anything, but all of us are asking ourselves the same questions over and over again: Why? Why didn’t you talk to us? What could we have done differently? Why didn’t we notice anything? Did you really see no other way out? Why now?

We won’t forget the good times we had over the past years and keep you in our hearts and minds forever!

Why? Seriously, WHY?

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Those who know me wont be surprised that I went out and bought the new iPhone 3GS straight away. From all the information that had been released at WWDC it was clear that the changes were not massive, but it was really only a small upgrade.
A lot of the new features are actually part of OS 3.0, and also available on the existing models:

• Copy/Paste
• MMS
• Landscape mode and keyboard in Notes. Mail and Messages
• Forward SMS and MMS messages
• Delete individual SMS or MMS messages
• Tethering
• Stereo Bluetooth (A2DP)
• Spotlight search
• Search in Mail, IPod and Notes
• Push notifications
• ….

But some new features are limited to the new hardware:

• Voice recognition (call contacts, launch music,…)
• Compass
• Video recording (including basic editing) and direct upload to mobile.me and YouTube

This brings me to the biggest noticeable change: The new camera. The image quality is clearly better and finally really usable. It is not going to replace my Canon G9 or even the 500D, but compared to the old camera it is a much needed improvement. Especially the “touch to focus” is impressive and really cool. In addition it can finally also take video. The quality is certainly acceptable and moved closer to the quality which is achievable with other mobile phones already.

But, is all of this really worth the upgrade? Probably not. But there is one more thing: The faster processor! And this is where it is becoming interesting. The experience with the existing models was certainly not bad at all, but sometimes the UI behaved slower then I would want it to have, and especially starting applications was a sometimes rather lengthy process.
This has changed a lot on the 3GS. Everything has become snappier and more usable! If you use your phone a lot, you will notice this straight away and won’t want to miss it anymore.

Have a look at the following video I took to make it more visible.

But not only the overall speed of the UI has changed. The 3G download/data speed has also improved a lot. I am not sure if this is true for every network, but my experience on the O2 network here in the UK is much better now. Download speeds have nearly doubled. I get speeds around 2Mbits/s on a regular basis now, which was a very rare situation before.

So, is it worth it? For me, the answer is a clear yes! I don’t regret it at all, although it was an expensive upgrade, and probably not worth it for everybody.

Into the Sky

Originally uploaded by mikehellers

Sunny day in London.

Well, everybody who lives in London must have noticed it: Summer has arrived!
Not a surprise then that i have spent most of the weekend out in the town, and of course had my camera with me most of the time.
What is the result? More media to fill those tubes.

Let’s start with some Gigapan Images:

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Since my Canon camera also takes video, well, guess what, here is some of that…

And last but not least, a small collection of plain old pictures…

A collection of pictures taken this saturday in London.

Yet another Gigapaixel panoramic image for the collection.
Taken from Trafalgar Way looking over Blackwall Basin towards the O2.

Click the image to open the viewer.

The following pictures have been taken with a Canon EOS 500D during a walk around London on a sunny (well, cloudy) afternoon.
Enjoy!

Time for another panorama. This one shows you the fantastic view of the O2 (formerly known as the Millenium Dome) in London.

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People who are following my blog on a regular basis have without any doubt noticed that I have somehow become fascinated by gigapixel panoramas over the past couple of months. A few weeks ago, SkyMovies contacted me asking if I would be interested in working with them to create a gigapixel panoramic picture for their website.

The interesting part of the project for me was that they were not only looking for somebody with experience in taking the actual picture, but who could also assist them in the post production work up to the actual go-live day of the actual project.

The actual deadline for the project was rather tight, causing us a number of issues. The first step was to identify the perfect location to take the actual picture. London is these days not an easy location for anybody who wants to take picture, for private or commercial use. You need permits everywhere! We had to exclude some locations which we identified during the first few days simply due to the fact that it was not possible to get the necessary permit on a short notice, in our case within a couple of days. The fact that we were just a couple of days before the G20 Summit in London didn’t help, as security measures in many places had been raised up a nodge.

We finally decided to take the picture from the roof of the IET building near Waterloo Bridge. The view from there is simply amazing, from the City on your left, the Southbank and the London Eye in front over to Westminster and Big Ben at the far right!

The concept behind the project was linked to Action movies, which was the theme for the month of April at Sky Movies. As such the idea was to show that all of London has gone “action mad” showing a number of Sky Movies and action heroes related items in the picture motivating people to discover as many of those as possible. This starts with action heroes showing up at several location, Sky Movies signs/posters, unusual street  and building names and much more. Some of these were present during the photo shoot, and others have been added during post production.

We were a bit unlucky with the ever changing weather conditions. While the forecast was for a bright and sunny day, the weather unfortunately changed during the afternoon of teh photo shoot and it became rather cloudy once we started taking the pictures. Due to the amount of preparation needed, and the tight deadline, this was something that we couldn’t change and had to live with it.

The equipment used to take the picture was the ‘GigaPan Epic’ robotic camera mount, a Canon G9 camera with an additional Teleconverter lense, and although I love the G9, the combination of the G9 with the Teleconverter lense requires near perfect lightning conditions for best results.

The viewing angel that we decided to use for the actual panorama gave as a field of view that was 100 degrees wide and 32 degrees high. This resulted in 836 images at 12 megapixel each to be taken (44 columns by 19 rows). To keep the quality as high as possible we took the pictures as RAW images, resulting around 19GByte of images as basis for the panorama.

Creating the actual final panorama using the GigaPan stitcher software took nearly 18 hours on a rather fast and recent MacPro. The result was a Panorama with a resolution of 90334 by 28821 pixels, meaning 2603 megapixel!

Over the days following the photo shoot, we finalized the necessary changes to the picture, including removing some of the artifacts created during the stitching ( i.e people/cars moving between two pictures etc…)

For a number of reasons, we decided not to host the picture on the gigapan.org servers, but host in on servers under our own control, which in this case was the content delivery platform of Interoute.

There is much more that can be said about this project, and it was an excellent opportunity and experience for myself. Over the coming weeks I will add some further details about teh technical bits behind Gigapixel images, some post production tips and tricks and especially some how-to type guidelines related to hosting GigaPan panoramas on your own servers.

Now, go over to Sky Movies, and have a look at the final result for yourself.