Highly Entropic

In case you were wondering why this blog is titled "Highly Entropic", this is the deal:

Entropy is a physical (thermodynamical) property. It's one of those things that can be pretty hard to understand. Roughly speaking, one can say that it is a measure of the "disorder" of a physical system. If something is "Highly Entropic", it is said to have a lot of "disorder".

The reason this blog is titled "Highly Entropic" is partly because I intend to blog on various (unrelated) things (for the moment it's mostly (DIY) photography, but I also plan on doing computer/Linux related posts, maybe somethings food-related, wine making, etc...).

A second reason is that I am quite "entropic" myself. Since a picture says more than a thousand words, I'll just leave you with this panoramic view of our garage (click for the deviantart link, click "Download" there for the full resolution photo)

Some things worth mentioning: This shot was made with the parnoramic mount I blogged earlier. On the bottom left, you can see some pieces of my ring flash. On the right side, you can see the rear of a wooden recumbent bike I built several years ago (there may be a blogpost about this in the (far) future).

The original picture is 250 megapixels large and was stiched together from 42 images using hugin. Doing so required around 9GB of memory at its peak -- one of the very few times I actually needed to setup a swap file (I only have 6GB of RAM). The resulting (8bit) compressed tiff file is 560MB.

On panoramic mounts and entropy

Still going strong in the DIY photography category (even though there has been some delay). This time it's a panoramic tripod mount!

With current software it's extremely easy to make a panoramic picture out of a set of overlapping photo's. (I use the excellent free and open source tool hugin.) There are, however, some things you should be aware of. Of course, the pictures should be taken from the same spot. The logical thing to do is to use a tripod. This gives good results for distant landscapes, but if you include near objects in the scene, you will encounter some problems stitching togenther the panorama. This is due to parallax and can be resolved by using (building!) a panoramic tripod mount like this:

(If you find the shadow on the above photo a bit weird, it's because I shot it with my ringflash, no particular reason)

Instructions and lots more after the jump!

On using the mandoline when really really hungry

DON'T DO IT!

I did, however. Picture below sums it up.

Warning: slightly graphic images after the jump (involving a small slice of flesh that once belonged to my thumb)