Earlier this year I took five side-by-side pictures of Bournemouth Pier and stitched them together using hugin. It’s quite easy: you just click somewhere recognisable on one photo, click on the same feature in another, and repeat several times. I took the entire set of pictures with exposure lock set, although it doesn’t seem to have worked very well for a couple of them.
There has been quite a response to a comment made by Clive Wright on a previous post about digitizing 35mm slides. Here’s what Clive said:
Having recently purchased a new camera, a Fuji Finepix S8000fd with 8Mpixels & a SuperMacro facility focusing down to 1cm (0.4″). I placed a slide on a small lightbox and held the camera approximately this distance in front of the lens and produced a fair digitized copy. Even the facial detection system works in this copy mode!
To eliminated camera shake and make the copying easier I then designed and manufactured a simple rig to attach the camera to and position the slide to be copied at the correct distance cover the entire film area, negating any need to crop the digitized image as the camera has a 3:2 quality setting. I have used this rig with both a lightbox and with a white diffuser positioned behind the slide using either the sun or a 60watt lamp as the light source.
The beauty of this rig is that it doesn’t require a steady hand (older people again) or the use of a tripod.
Ever since I heard it was possible I’d been meaning to set up passwords with my utility companies so that they can verify their identity to me when they turn up at my door. This week I tried it with my gas supplier. They said they don’t do that, but don’t worry, it’s fine, I can just check their ID card and phone up to verify that the name on the ID card is one of their employees/contractors.
If you’ve got a Sky+ box and use it to record things on series link, check your scheduled recordings on Sunday when the clocks have gone back. Last time the clocks changed we had to re-schedule the recordings because they were all wrong by an hour…
Try typing this into a predictive text phone: “Tidying treacle in Cornwall.”