CITY ESCAPES
Nature Photography, LLC
Newsletter
August, 2012
City Escapes Collaborates on New Photo “Weaving” Program
For the past several years, City Escapes Nature Photography has been collaborating with University of Utah Professor Valerio Pascucci to develop a new method for stitching together multiple images into a single panoramic image. While Professor Pascucci and his team developed the stitching software, City Escapes Nature Photography provided several large sets of images as the raw data. Among the sets were a roughly 300-image panorama of Mount Rushmore and multiple sets of Lake Louise in Banff National Park, Canada, the largest of which consisted of over 3,000 individual images and took over 16 hours to complete.
The challenge for Dr. Pascucci and his team was to develop a more effective method of stitching together images that would eliminate current difficulties such as cars on streets being cut in half, or in our case, pieces of canoes, rather than the full canoes, showing up on a lake. (Due to the way in which the software actually works, he has dubbed the new technique “weaving,” rather than stitching, which is entirely appropriate.) While the resulting software is still in its development stage, it shows great promise as a must-have tool for panoramic photographers. Jodi had a brief opportunity to play with the prototype and is very excited about its potential to make the life of a photographer much easier.
On August 8, 2012, Professor Pascucci’s Ph.D. student, Brian Summa, presented their new weaving technique in a paper entitled “Panorama Weaving: Fast and Flexible Seam Processing” at the premier computer science conference for graphics, SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques). Widely considered to be the most important annual conference for the presentation and publication of new research in the field of graphics and animation, SIGGRAPH is attended by thousands of computer scientists every year, and getting a paper accepted for publication is no small feat. Currently fewer than 20% of submitted papers are accepted.
We congratulate Professor Pascucci and his team for their strides in solving one of the more perplexing problems in panorama stitching. We look forward to continuing our work with Dr. Pascucci, and are proud to be a part of this collaboration.
Framing Pause Coming Soon
City Escapes Nature Photography will soon be temporarily unable to frame images for you, as we will be moving our headquarters and will not have access to all of our equipment. Though we do not yet know quite when the move will happen, we wanted to give you ample warning, so that you could order any images you wanted us to frame prior to the move. Our unframed paper print and canvas options should remain available throughout the move.
August’s Monthly Specials
Get 10% off of unframed, 8x18 prints of “How Pawful” and “Night Thunder – American Falls” when you order from our specials page. As with all of our unframed prints, these prints are eligible for our No Hassle Returns.
August’s Fun Facts
As the Olympics draw to a close, we look at some of the champions in the animal kingdom:
- We all know that the cheetah is the fastest mammal, reaching speeds up to 70 mph. But does it win the prize for fastest animal on the planet? Not even close. The peregrine falcon obliterates the cat’s record, attaining speeds of over 200 mph while in a dive.
- The winner of the high-jump goes, not surprisingly, to an insect. The spittle bug can jump 115 times its body length.
- The top award for marathon distances in the animal kingdom goes way beyond 26.2 miles. Traveling 50,000 miles in a year, from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back again, the Arctic tern is the hands-down winner of greatest distance athlete.
- The insects win again in the strongest-critter category, with the dung beetle pulling 1,140 times its own body weight.
- How would Michael Phelps compare to the fastest swimmer in the animal kingdom? Not well: the sailfish, built for speed, has been clocked at close to 70 mph.
If you have any questions, or suggestions for future newsletters, please email us at: relationships@cityescapesphotography.com
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CITY ESCAPES Nature Photography, LLC
www.cityescapesphotography.com
509-396-5154
