Political activism and open source

What an intriguing idea. A group of people are beginning to create an open source project to give the American public more information about the inner happenings of the federal government. Seems like a way to get people in all sectors of the country involved: politicians, businessmen, geeks, and even the politically inactive.Bill Bradley, one of the proponents of the new idea, published a book earlier this year called The New American Story. The review makes it sound like quite a good read for those interested (and those who are not, but should be) in saving our nation from the political corruption we have begun to fall into. Something as simple as voting can change the face of politics, if only people would get out of their houses and do it.

Panorama proposition

So I went to the BYU University Chorale concert tonight at the Provo Tabernacle. (I intend to write a bit more about that later.) I decided it would be cool to test my skills with Hugin, which I recently discovered, to create a panorama of the front of the Tabernacle.

It was quite an ordeal. I took three sets of shots of the entire east side of the building using exposure lock and burst mode on my Canon PowerShot A550. The first set, which I took prior to the concert, had too many people in it, so I didn’t attempt to use it. On the second set, which I took after the concert, I locked the exposure on the upper part of the building, including the sky. For the third set I locked the exposure on the lower part of the building. Because of the ISO speed difference, the third set turned out blurry on most of the shots, so I couldn’t use it.

So, I settled on using the second set of shots, which contained about 50 exposures. I spent probably an hour aligning the control points on the frames I wanted. Cross your fingers. I ran the stitcher and got this:

Not quite ideal.

I played around with the various projections and but still came up with very distorted images. I followed some instructions on this how-to and, after some post processing, produced this image:

(click here to view it)

It’s all still a bit rounded (I tried to fix that, too, believe you me), but I’m pretty impressed with what I was able to make of 50 photos, some open-source software, and a laptop.

New cameras and open source imaging software

So I got a new digital camera yesterday. It’s a Canon PowerShot A550 (review), and I like it a lot.

I went on a walk today and took a whole bunch of pictures of BYU campus, the MTC, and the Provo Temple. On the hill of the Centennial Carillon, I took pictures for a panorama. Since my camera doesn’t have onboard panorama stitching features, and I can’t use the software Canon provides on a linux machine, I went searching for an open source alternative. I found Hugin.

Hugin is a very powerful, compact piece of software. It allows you to select the images you want, put them in order, and hand-pick the control points to use when stitching. The software is intelligent enough to locate corresponding control points on adjacent images when you give it approximate coordinates.

I was very pleased with the results. Here is a copy of the image I created.