Sundries

I’ve recently been getting the photography bug again and I’ve been watching some training videos recently.  One of them was on panoramic photography and how to correctly take them and put them together in Photoshop.  I’ve never done any panos so I figured I’d give it a shot.  I went outside my condo, not the most photogenic place I could go but it gets the job done.  I took a series of about 15 photos, 7 across and then did another row above that to capture the sky.

I set my camera (Nikon D60) to manual mode with a Nikkor 50mm 1.8 lens and set the exposure to f11 at 1/100 of a second.  I brought the images into Lightroom and made my basic adjustments and synced them to all the images and then imported them into Photoshop’s pano-merge function.  It only took about 2 minutes to take all the pictures but about 10 minutes for Photoshop to work on them and show me the final merged image.

I cropped the image and adjusted lighting further till I was happy with the overall look.  To add some sharpness I used a nice little trick I recently learned.  Make a copy of the entire image in a new layer and then go to Filters – Other – High Pass.  Adjust the levels to something between 4 – 8 depending on what give you the best selection of edges and then run the filter.  Then change that layers blend mode to either Overlay or Soft Light to see the effect and sharpening it gives to your image.  I like to go a little stronger than I think I need because I can easily lower the opacity on that layer to adjust the amount of the effect.

Finally, I made another copy of the entire image on a new layer and applied a levels layer adjustment to really push up the rich blues of the sky.  I then used the layer mask to first apply a ‘black to white’ gradient to get most of the effect on the sky only.  Then I finally went in and used the brush to mask out the building and trees a bit.   I didn’t spend hours working on the mask, maybe 10 minutes, so it’s not perfect but it works.  I applied a slight blur to the mask to smooth out the edges.

The final step was creating a blank layer and setting the blend mode to Soft Light.   I then painted with black and white brush set about 25% opacity to help darken and brighten select spots of the photo.  The blacktop of our parking area isn’t as black as the photo from the sun bleaching it out a bit so I darkened that down as well as a few other select areas.

So, finally the image.  You can view the FULL SIZED image by clicking on it but it is very large, almost 5 megabytes in size and sized at 5571 X 1200 pixels.

I really enjoyed taking this image even though the parking lot isn’t very attractive.  I’m goin to look for more chances to take some more panos in the future.

**James.

I’ve been spending time recently in WOW trying to get control of my storage space.  I’ve been playing for about 4 years now and even though I’m filled up with all 20 slot bags on my character (except for the lame backpack of course since you can’t change it) and in all the bank slots but I’m still having trouble storing all my gear.

I’ve also recently given up mining on my main character Ogiue and she is now doing only Enchanting and Tailoring.  The problem is that both of these professions require me to store a large amount of material to do them.   Aside from making good money the collecting professions such as mining, skinning, and herbalism make it very easy to just send everything to a bank alt to sell.  I’ve done that with my enchanting and tailoring items as well but once again ran out of bank space on that character as well.

I found a great solution though, I’ve created my own guild for my bank alt and purchased 4 bank slots for him.  I’m now the guild leader on two separate guilds, each called Genshiken, on two different servers.  The first Genshiken guild isn’t really active at all and the new Genshiken guild is just my bank alt.  Now I mostly keep all my soulbound items and my cooking items on my main character and store most everything else on my bank alt.  I’ve got more than enough space to keep everything and just need to use the in game mail to move items back and forth.  It’s still a minor pain to do that.

I really wish Blizzard would come up with some type of extra storage area for all the soulbound items you don’t wish to destroy.  I must have about 50 pieces of holiday items that I just can’t bring myself to destroy just to free up some space.  A good example is the Winter Veil (Christmas) holly which transforms your mount into Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer.  I had taken a break from WOW last Christmas so the ones I had were from almost 2 years ago:

It was fun pulling this out and running around Dalaran or flying around Northrend on my own Reindeer.  I’m glad I didn’t destroy these a long time ago to save up space.

I also did the small little Day of the Dead holiday recently in WOW.  I haven’t logged in yet to see if the little mariachi pet is still there or not but he was cute.  He didn’t get added to the regular pet inventory so I’m guessing he’s only temporary:

I’ve recently been starting to feel a little burnt out on the game, I think it’s because I’ve just taken up and leveled Tailoring which cost a huge amount of money and time.  I’ve been cutting back on wow as my interests in Photography have come up again so I may just take WOW easy for a week or two so i don’t get to the point where I just cancel my account again.  I’m really looking forward to the coming holidays in the game and don’t want to feel like I’m being burdened to log in to complete them.

**James.