Apparently I was a good boy this year
Meet the new Wandercamera:
Why, yes. I took a picture of it with the old camera. I know: It’s a little like making an employee train his replacement. Can’t be helped.
A Nikon Coolpix S9700, used and refurbished. With GPS; it took some time but I figured out how to make it work. Does very nice pictures:
And, yes, that’s the concretion from the Nacimiento Mine that I had sawed in half at the Earth Treasures Show. I got some silicon carbide sandpaper and polished it up. Came out pretty good.
I’m now working on an old geode given to me as a child. Nearly pure silica; rather harder going.
Ooooooo. It takes panorama shots.
Well.
On the one hand, that’s way cool, and should improve the quality of my panoramas for the book considerably, with practice.
On the other hand, it makes all my old panoramas obsolete. Going back and redoing them with the new camera would be a hassle.
Congrats on the “new” camera. I hope it acquits itself well.
As for your panoramas, maybe not obsolete, but would certainly show the change in available technology over the course of your project. If you’re self-publishing it won’t matter beyond your own preference.
I haven’t decided on publication yet. Or, it would be more correct to say, I haven’t found a publisher yet. I would love to see the book in print, but with all the photographs, it may not be a project many publishers would want to touch.
Kent, what software are you using for the old panoramas? Depending on the camera model, there are tools out there (photoshop chief among them) that should be able to handle the lens distortion and vignetting fairly well. It may not quite match the seamlessness of the new camera, but it should look less like three photos placed side by side.
I’m using Gimp to stitch the photos by hand. I haven’t a budget for more professional software, but if you know of some freeware that does a better job, that would be excellent.
There is actually a slight advantage in having the frame boundaries show — it allows me to describe features in the pans by reference to the frame they’re in. The new pans with the new camera I may have to label by hand.