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One of the great things about living and working on a boat is that the view out the office window is far more interesting than that afforded by cubicles in corporate America. Like most people these days, I have a digital camera (more than one, but that is a story for another day).
Incidentally I highly recommend that you get a waterproof camera for your boat. They are inexpensive and if you have one your anxiety level will go way down, as everything on a boat gets wet sooner or later. Mine is an older model no longer sold, but if you are in the market for a new camera you might checkout either a Olympus Stylus waterproof model or a Pentax Optio W60. Please note that these links are current as of August 2008 and models change frequently.
Once you have some photos you will naturally want to share them. Of course you can email them, burn them to a CD or DVD, get them printed on photographic paper or upload them to a photo sharing website like Flickr or Snapfish.
Just made available is a really new and innovative photo sharing website from Microsoft Research called Photosynth. What makes Photosynth different is that it stitches your images together to make one big composite view. Basically this means that if you walk around an object taking lots of photos, the website will combine them into one big 3D view of the object. This is a case where a picture is worth a thousand words, so rather than blog about how it is done, I encourage you to simply go to the site and view some of the samples.
The easiest way to learn what it is all about is to watch their short video which will show you how to create your own synth for free.
This weekend I decided to try it for the first time and I have created three photo albums or Synths here. This was my first time, so my results were a mixed bag.
For my first attempt I simply uploaded about 100 photos of a sailboat that I once considered buying. This LeComte NorthEast 38 sailboat was not a particularly good synth. In fact the website gave me a synth rating of 8% out of a possible 100%. What this means is that the website was unable to figure out how the images joined together very well. This is understandable as I had not taken the photos with this application in mind, and when taking the photos I had zoomed in on details rather than insuring that the photos overlapped in their coverage. After this attempt I decided I needed to take some more photos and try again.
I am currently in Tarpon Springs, Florida, the sponge diving capital of the US. Tarpon Springs has a large Greek community and the downtown is adjacent to the sponge docks. Here there is a bronze statue of a sponge diver as well as a plaza with an older sponge boat set in the plaza. I shot both of these locations and returned to the computer.
The Tarpon Springs Florida Greek boat synth turned out much better although not perfect and the sponge diver is OK.
This is one of those things in life where practice makes perfect. The key is to make sure that you have lots of overlapping area in your photos, something I could have done much better at.
Please remember that I am more of a geek than an artist, so I am sure that with a little practice your results will be far better than mine. This service is free, lots of fun, and easy to use. Give it a try and I am sure you will come up with lots of ways to use it no one has though of before.
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