Saturday 24 January 2009

New toys

I bought a digital camera yesterday. The Canon Rebel XS, with a 18-55mm lens. It was a pretty nice deal from Staples, so I'm quite happy with this so far. The picture quality is impressive, and it's easy enough to use for a DSLR.

I took the first opportunity I could to take a few shots and try out this nice little program available in the repositories: Hugin. It is a very complete and pretty simple tool for compositing images and creating panoramas.

Past the first little hurdle where Hugin was trying to use 'autopano-sift', which although it seems installed since the package exists, it looks like I needed to change the configuration to just using 'autopano'. After taking four quick pictures, one with the full-automatic settings, and three more with the automatically-detected shutter speed and aperture set manually, and selecting a few common points between each pictures, I was able to get an almost-perfect panoramic picture of my street.

Some things to keep in mind: keep a somewhat constant overlap between pictures, don't trust the wizard for finding the common points -- they won't.

Sadly, I once again had issues with using just a USB cable to connect my camera to Jaunty. Same thing as with the other camera I had tried before. Fortunately, I could download the pictures directly from the SD card, and F-spot happily imported my pictures from that point.

To use hugin, you will likely want to install the hugin, hugin-tools, enblend and autopano-sift packages.

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