Jane's Journal

Every time I try my hand at Hugin, I realise the less I worry the better my panorama's become. Of course, you're supposed to snap an X number of pictures with the same settings, making sure all the lighting is correct, use a tripod etc. I just snap x number of pictures loosely from the hip, load the JPGs into Hugin and stitch asap before tossing the Tiff into Lightroom for some last minute corrections and the Gimp for a watermark that makes a dent into an 11k pixel picture.

The Frans Hals Museum Binnentuin

This wonderful 17th century building is home to the Frans Hals museum. Frans Hals was a famous Dutch painter from Haarlem, so it's no wonder this museum was named after him. Wikipedia states the museum dates back to 1862, but the building is much older. This is the view from the gardens. As you can see, the weather was horrible. I also had to blur out the man's face, as I didn't ask for permission snapping his picture.


Click for larger - this is huge!

The North-Holland Dune reservation

This panorama I shot from under the shadow of a pine tree. I can't quite recall if the ground was really so uneven, but there was definite up-and-down action because of the dunes.
The North-Holland Dune reservation (Wiki only in Dutch) is a 5300 hectare forest and dune area between Wijk aan Zee and Bergen. The area is used in three places for drinking water and is also a popular hiking area.
We had gorgeous sunny weather and enjoyed the sunshine (SPF 30 FTW!). When we arrived at lunch, the weather turned and we took a quick route home. If you're ever in the neighbourhood of the Dune reservation, I can recommend it! It's gorgeous.


Click for larger - this is huge!

Tulip fields and Dutch Skies

I must admit it felt a bit like cheating to stop the car down the roadside and shoot the tulip fields on our way to visiting a friend, but here you go. I do love how this turned out -- the skies are perfect Dutch Masterpieces and the post-processing in Lightroom did wonders for the contrast.
The field closest to the viewer has already been 'beheaded' -- tulip heads are taken from the plant so more energy can be stored in the bulb more quickly, which makes the harvest time shorter.


Click for larger - this is huge!

Hope you enjoyed these! I will start on the rest of the pictures now, which should be considerably less work.

Lange Jaap (Tall John in English) is the lighthouse of Den Helder. It is the tallest cast-iron lighthouse of Europe.

I've used Hugin to stitch the seven, landscape-oriented, pictures together. It's been a learning process!

Things I've learned:
- Set your exposure etc. for all the images thesame.
- Use a tripod where possible

Since this was a spur-of-the-moment thing I just shot it from the loose wrist, panning up as I went, but Hugin managed to stitch everything together into one awesomely huge tiff file. So awesomely huge even, that I had to redo it in JPG just so as it would not burst my /tmp at the seams.

Hugin is a cross-platform panaroma stitching program, so it should work as well on Windhoos and Mac as it does on Linux.
(sudo apt-get hugin!)

Another first to tick off the list!

Click through to "view all sizes" to view it in original size. You can almost read the sign on the bottom....



Now, if only I could remember how exactly I got this really quite good blend of all these exposures....