New Letterhead!

I changed the letterhead as soon as this was ready.  I'd been waiting for the sky to have just the right amount of cloud - none = boring; too much = , well, too much.  Took a few hours' PhotoShopping to get it from 11 digital frames, shot from my secret location, to one panorama, then add text and tweak it.  The original is over 80 MPixels in size, and likely the first 360-degree panorama ever taken of Ushguli.  Here (in this post, above) is a larger version if you want to save it - click once on it and you can.

Panoramas, Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

Posting this entirely using battery power on laptop & cellphone as, after a night of fairly heavy snow, we lost electricity as expected.

Hmm, looks like I was a bit hasty in writing off the EOS's bundled panorama stitching software.  It doesn't give a great size or tonal range when you work with RAW files, but convert them to .tif - lowering the contrast and getting the component images as close as possible to each other in tone in the process - & suddenly you're at full original resolution.  Here are a couple of pairs of panoramas to compare for the new and old ways of doing things, old attempt on top, new underneath.  A vast improvement.

Ushguli Panoramas, Svaneti, Georgia

Two 6-shot Ushguli panoramas hot off yesterday's press - the top one from the afternoon, bottom from the morning.  So it's either 12 new pictures or 2 for you today, depending on whether you're a glass-half-full or -half-empty type. I used the stitching software which came with my Canon EOS camera - not that I consider it to be the best; it's too limited in file size output, and only offers 8-bit/channel colour depth; but it does give a quick-&-dirty look at what the result will be when I shell out for a better panorama stitching programme.  Which I must do eventually.

Mt Ushba and Etseri, March 2007

Unlike my recent haiku postings, this one may be worth a thousand words. It's certainly worth a few megapixels, being stitched together from FIVE scanned frames. Etseri is below and to the right of Ushba, which - as in my blog's title bar photo - is the sharp peak, at right here.

Panoramas, nr Tqibuli, Imereti, October 2006

Views after we had left the main highway and begun climbing up to the town, looking out across the Caucasus.

I made these the hard way - separate photos lined up by hand in my computer's photo editor. Not easy, but it gets the job done.