Public Lab Research note


Spherical KAP over Cocodrie

by cfastie | November 22, 2014 17:44 22 Nov 17:44 | #11385 | #11385

cfastie was awarded the Photo Documentation Barnstar by Hudonnoodles for their work in this research note.


The KAP rig I flew on Saturday at the Barnraising was a motorized pan/tilt rig which I controlled with a standard RC transmitter. I could point the camera in any direction (except up) and trigger the shutter manually, which I did 900 times. I could not see where the camera was pointed when it was more than a couple hundred feet away from me, so most of the shooting was more or less blind. So I was surprised to find today that 37 of the photos stitched together into a continuous panorama covering the greater part of a sphere (only the top of the sky is missing). This is my favorite result.
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Chrome no longer supports Silverlight which is required to view Photosynth embeds properly. For the full experience you can use another browser. Viewing the panorama at Photosynth helps a little.
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The camera on the rig was a Canon PowerShot S100, a model which I have just started to use. The CMOS sensor is good enough that I increased the ISO to 160 and was able to capture some of the shots with a slightly smaller aperture (f-stop ranged from 2 to 8). The increased sharpness might have offset the increased noise from a higher ISO. More experimentation is needed.


2 Comments

Fantastic result Chris, very cool!

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Oh, my gosh. Sharing widely. So neat!

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