Pete Dudchenko

My wife and I recently took a road-trip to the Grand Canyon and as you can imagine, we took lots of photos. One thing I wanted to try however was to figure out a way to create a panoramic photo using a few digital photos that I had taken of the trip.

Luckily, before we ventured out on the road, I had read that in order to do this with a regular camera, there are a few tricks to learn that you must consider while taking the digital photo. Ideally, I would snap a photo, move the camera slightly to the right, snap another photo, then repeat and when I got back home, I would splice the images together and viola, there’s the panoramic picture. This of course only works if the photos are perfectly aligned. The trick, is to overlap the subsequent photos because this will allow the splicing (that occurs later) to work best.

Here’s a sample of what I mean. Say you wanted to create a panoramic photo that looks like this:

You would need to take say, three separate digital photos in order to capture everything.

 This requires that the line where one photo ends is exactly where the next photo begins. This is impossible to do on-the-fly. Rather, try to overlap the camera’s viewpoints about 30% so it looks more like this:

In this case, I took four photos but made sure there was considerable overlap between each photo. This is important because when we splice the photos together the tool we use will require this overlap to set up the photos and align them properly.

The other trick, which I learned after my trip unfortunately, is that you want to maintain the same white balance on your camera for each photo. This basically means setting the white balance to a manual setting or turning the auto-balance feature on your camera off. The reason for this is that, especially with outdoor photos, the adjustment of white balance from one photo to the next can throw off the panoramic photo later on. The left side of the photo may look darker or lighter then the right.

Finally, splicing the photo together is actually the easiest part. I know Photoshop does this but since I didn’t have Photoshop, I needed something else, and preferably free,

It turns out, Microsoft offers just this sort of thing from their Windows Live Photo Gallery which is a free download. After installing and adding the photos into the library, I just selected the 4 images I wanted to use and then right-click to “create panoramic photo” and wait. It runs on its own and the end result is a great panoramic photo to save or print out.

I printed mine out to keep at the office using EzPrints if you want to try them.

Did you want to see the final panoramic photo from my trip to the Grand Canyon?

Went sailing on The America last Friday. It was great to be on such a large ship and to cruise along the San Diego shore line.

For all three of you that follow my RSS feed (ok, I’m kidding, three may actually be an over-exaggeration) I wanted to give a quick announcement that I’ve updated my RSS feed URL. I noticed that while my titles came through on my RSS reader (Google Reader), my post body and images were not appearing so I’ve migrated over to feedburner and if you’re interested, the new URL is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/PeteDudchenko

You can also click on any of the RSS links I have on this page as well. The old URL will still be around but this one will be better for reading.

If you haven’t heard of Google Voice I recommend you check it out. Its still invite only I believe but if you were lucky enough to get an invite then you probably noticed that they’ve been offering free business cards with your new Google Voice Phone Number to help promote their service (and to help you promote your new number).

I noticed this myself the other day and remembered a post by Lifehacker about creating Social Calling Cards and thought that this was a perfect opportunity to create some free social cards myself.

By default, the format that Google offers is more of a traditional business card with space to add your address, name and email. It’s very easy however to transform these fields into social contact information by eliminating the address information and replacing it with any social network you want to add. I personally added my Twitter Account, along with the address to this website, and an email address (in addition to my Google Voice number).

After submitting my mailing address, I was done and in only a few days I received 25 free social cards in the mail.

So thanks Google!

Had lunch with the guys today. Grabbed a cup of gumbo and a pound of shrimp/crayfish. Good stuff!

There are a million BlackBerry Application reviews out there but I wanted to take a moment to focus only on the newer BlackBerry Apps, and by newer, I mean newer to me. I’ll try to focus only on new BlackBerry apps that have come out in the last few months or so but if I mix a few up, apologies in advance:

SocialScope

This new BlackBerry app is invite only and if you’re looking for an invite, I’m sorry but I was just one of the lucky ones that got in early. Let me tell you though, it’s awesome. For those unfamiliar, SocialScope is a Twitter/Facebook app rolled into one. I can create groups, update my statuses, post pics and more all from one app. If you can’t get SocialScope and want a Twitter recommendation, I would go with Ubertwitter.

Link: SocialScope

WordPress for BlackBerry

Finally! An application by WordPress where I can actually post pictures and posts directly to my blog. There were alternatives but this one seems to do it better than the others and with much less hassle.

Link: WordPress for BlackBerry

Evernote

Evernote is awesome for taking notes either at work or for personal needs. The cool thing is that it allows you to tag your notes (just like GMail) so multiple classifications is easy to do. Plus it has textual recognition capabilities for words that appear in photos and a great search capability too which makes finding information easier. The BlackBerry App makes it so easy to access my notes right on my phone, or even add new notes which are later sync’d with my computers. I especially love the ability to record a voice note on my BlackBerry and then sync it to my laptop to transcribe later.

Link: Evernote for BlackBerry

WorldMate Live

This is great for anyone travelling. I use the free version but there’s also a pay version as well. The nice thing is that once you receive an email confirmation from say, booking a flight or a hotel, you just forward it to a specific email address and Worldmate will parse through all the data to make it easy for you to see when you leave, what airline, what gate, hotel address, etc. All of which is accessible from your phone if you also have this app.

Link: WorldMate Live for BlackBerry

Food Network

Don’t laugh, this app has really come in handy when at the grocery store trying to figure out dinner for the night. Its more than just a recipe list, it offers a breakdown of recipes by different categories such as “quick and easy” or “healthy.” You can even save recipes in your own area for future reference. Makes “what’s for dinner?” much easier to deal with.

Link: Food Network App for BlackBerry

1. At this point, everyone is a contender

As much as I go nuts during the offseason, it’s always fun to look at the draft and training camp and see how teams adjusted to their needs. I think if you ask almost any fan they feel they have a chance right now (sorry Detroit). At the very least I think everyone feels they are set up to perform better this year than last year.

2. Did the Saints do enough on defense to make them a legit contender this year?

I’m a fan so see my comments above on being biased but I think they did improve. If you look at the team last year they were plagued by injuries which basically put them back to the same “D” they had in 2007 (plus Vilma of course). Now, they’ve got a healthy bunch, and have added significant upgrades to their secondary which most would argue was the biggest weakness the last few years. Pair that with a new Defensive Coordinator who likes to pressure QB’s and it sounds like great potential.

3. No more Favre News

Sorry Packer fans (or should I say Jets fans or Minny fans?) but regardless of how you feel about whether he should retire or not, I’m just a little tired of how this news seems to trump everything else that’s out there. Maybe the media is really to blame here? What about charity work players offer during the offseason? Maybe let’s get to see more information about the recent draft picks and what we can expect? Heck, let’s spend the time learning about the different formations teams like to run to help educate fans about what they might see.anything but Favre.

4. I’m feeling kinda Sunday

There’s something fun about the tradition of having people over to watch the game, eating food, drinking beer and watching the same exact commercials for the next 16+ weeks. I think I’ve leaned more about heavy duty trucks during football season than any other time of the year.

5. Twitter and the NFL

I think this year is really going to be interesting for the fans and perhaps a headache for the PR departments of each team. As the season progresses, players now have the opportunity to speak directly to the masses to say anything they want. Did they feels the ref made a bad call? They can tweet it. Did they not get the ball enough? They can tweet it. It will be interesting to see what sort of censorship is placed on players through their use on Twitter. I personally can’t wait though.  Especially for training camp. I don’t live in the same city as my team but through the fans taking pictures and updating observations on Twitter (not to mention the players and the media) it should make it a lot easier to keep up on the latest news.