xtcian

keepin' perspective

4/21/08

I'm dedicating today's entry to one of my favorite Spazmoid All-Time Dork-Outs: namely, a lifetime odyssey of stitching pictures together badly. I've been working for the ultimate panorama shot since I was ten years old and living in London, scaling St. Paul's Cathedral and trying to get a snapshot of the entire city at once. If I can find those pictures, I'll post them, but they were taken with an Instamatic camera with 110 film, so it all looks a little like Niépce's first photo ever taken.

As the years passed, I figured out how to hold the camera correctly, and then Photoshop created "photomerge", quite possibly the most magical use of computer processing power since Zaxxon. While I did the massive autumn panorama of the farm by hand, now I'm able to create vistas like this one over the farm a few Decembers ago:

click any of these pictures for bigger versions

It's not always perfect - last night, during the full moon, I snapped some pictures of our porch from inside our darkened house, and it looks like something from a carnival ride:

Either way, it's a damn sight better than my panoramas of yore. Below, for your endless amusement and unfathomable boredom, I have an old bulletin board of photos that have yet to be Photoshop Photomerged™. Clockwise from top... the Carrboro farmhouse Annie, Greg and I lived in (1994); my bedroom at the Pink House (1997); my dorm room, 407 Grimes, which I inhabited with Jon and Chip (1987); the Carrboro farmhouse again in winter (1995); the Purple House in winter (1992); and the same spot in Audubon Park in New Orleans with different people from 1987 to 1997.