The Weekly Photo (Week 35) Tiger at the Helm

Tiger at the Helm

We were walking through the mall when we came upon a children's play area. Sunlight was streaming through a skylight like a searchlight beam on one of the rides. The photo illustrates the limited range in brightness levels that can be accommodated in a photo. To us the mall was brightly illuminated with the tiger in the boat just being in sunlight.

In the photo even the ceiling lights are just grey areas, while the tiger and the boat look bright.

The investigative types among my readers might be able to derive the time of day from the angle of the shadows. I will spare you the effort: the photo was taken about 3:30 in the afternoon. I left the geotag on the photo to demonstrate how the different services can make use of this.

Here is how it looks in SkyDrive (only my own, location is not shared), Picasa, and Bing Maps as reached from “Map it” in Photo Gallery.

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

The Weekly Photo (Week 34) West Side Market

West Side Market

Celebrating 100 years of service, the West Side Market in Cleveland, Ohio is both a historic site and a delightful shopping experience. With just under 30,000 square feet (less than 2800 m²), this market is modest in size compared to today’s giant supermarkets, many of which are twice this size. It is different, however, in that some one hundred independent vendors offer a wide array of produce, meats, baked goods, and more.

I took a few shots with my Nokia Lumia 900 phone. There was another test in the back of my mind, but a colleague brought up combining photos, so I quickly loaded them into Photosynth. You can see the result by clicking the image here on the right.

With a little bit of looking around, you can see the location (just scroll down) and you can find other views of this amazing place.

If you cannot shop there in person, you can visit the West Side Market site (click on name or the logo). Be sure to also see some of the historic photos on that site.

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

The Weekly Photo (Week 33) Summer Blossoms

Summer Blossoms

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

The Weekly Photo (Week 32) Fall Flowers

Fall Flowers - Photo Gallery Auto Collage

Microsoft updated Photo Gallery – formerly known as Windows Live Photo Gallery. Besides the name change, the most notable new feature is “Auto Collage”.

Some four years ago Microsoft Research introduced  AutoCollage, an amazing and unusual collage builder. Face detection and automatic identification of interesting parts of photos, and smooth blending and arranging of the component pictures, made creating collages easy and fun. This technology has now been brought into Photo Gallery.

Sadly, the tool in Photo Gallery takes no instructions from the user at all. The results are pleasant enough, but there is no chance to tweak or adjust the resulting collage.  A minimum of seven pictures are required to make an “Auto Collage”.

I had a collage made in Picasa last Fall, so I used the same photos for an Auto Collage. Here, first the new Photo Gallery creation.

For comparison here is my Picasa collage. Picasa offers full control over placement, orientation, frames, size, and background, however, the components have “hard” edges. The results are quite different. Enjoy.

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck