Paso Robles

A bed and breakfast on a hilltop overlooking a winery, sampling a lot of impressive wines, and some of my favorite twisty roads. What could possibly go wrong.

For when fisheye is just too mundane...

I recently bought a Ricoh Theta, a specialistic camera that has TWO fisheye lenses on two sides of the device, and produces 360 degree pictures in one shot.

The pictures that come out look quite crazy, for when normal fisheye isn't quite crazy enough. I've made pictures like the one below by stitching together multiple fisheye shots in the past, but it's a lot of work, this device does it all in one shot.

There are downsides: it tries to find an exposure that works all directions, so if there's any strong light/dark varience anywhere, you'll get washed out / too dark lighting etc. There's no preview, so it is hit and miss what you get. Combine that with what is sure to be a crappy sensor and image re-projection, and image quality is often borderline unusable.

Also, if you hand-hold it, you'll have some gigantic fingers in the picture (which I cropped out in all pictures). You can put it on a tripod and activate it from your phone for better results.

But I don't care because I love the way it looks:

These two pictures come from the same shot. The first one is the way it comes "raw" from the camera (it turns the two spherical fisheye shots into an equirectangular projection), with a strip at the top cropped off that had my fat fingers in it. The second one is re-projected to be more like a traditional fisheye shot (stereographic), though notice it has >180 degrees of view and it doesn't have any circular borders (a circular fisheye would have a circle inset about 10% from edges of this photo, a "full frame" fisheye would only be able to capture a rectangle inside that circle).

Here's a few more:

In the last one, notice from the shadows that we're actually standing across from eachother, looking at eachother :)

Crater Lake

Road trip to Crater Lake and surroundings with my mum. Was experimenting with using my 18mm-equiv super wide angle instead of my fisheye, but in the end I like the pictures with my app GridPic the best!

my bathroom, expanded

nc2 offices

Made another photo composite, this time of the architecture company Iara works at:

GridPic: iOS app

If you follow this blog, you know how much I like to create composite photo grid pictures (like the ones on here), and now I've created an iOS app to make those pictures super easy to create: GridPic.

Below an example image I've created with this app in less than 5 minutes:

Chile

We had time for a trip to Chile, where we visited Santiago, Valparaiso / Vina del Mar, Colchagua Valley (wineries) and Patagonia (Torres del Paine national park).

Food was great.. we ate a lot of fish (I think we had a ceviche at least daily) which they do rather well, and drank serious amounts of wine (we're big fans of chilean wine if that wasn't clear already). Visiting many of our favourite wineries in person was a treat, especially since in most of them we received hour-long private tours and got edumecated in the art of wine-making rather thoroughly (wine tourism isn't as mainstream there as in california).

As a tourist, Chile feels very safe, well organized, and much like a first world country in every way, with as disadvantage that everything was surprisingly... expensive. Another shocker was the people.. not much latino spirit going on here, but much more... "reserved". Almost like northern europe.

Torres del Paine is seriously stunning, shame you have to travel this far to get there (total flying time from SF: 16 hrs, followed by about 4-5 hrs of driving, 2 of which over some seriously rough gravel roads, sorry rental car!). We got rained on a bit, sadly, but still managed to see some stunning mountains and glaciers.