Pixel picked a good moment to sit up in the windowsill. This is probably my best cat photo to date.

I'm just now wrapping up posting the second day of pictures from the June Washington trip, and included in them were some cat pictures, just in time for the Friday Cat Blogging tradition. I'm tired at this point, so it's only fair to show a tired cat:

Much delayed, it seems I have managed to complete all of the editing for the Washington hike photos in time to get everything sent out for the holidays. There were 471 total exposures (about a hundred less than I thought, when I first started editing, but I'd forgotten that my shoot rate tapered off towards the end of the trip), out of which I produced 274 final edited images. This number is deceptively low this pass; it doesn't take into account that there were lots of stitched images that condensed down into individual panoramas. Although the total number of resulting panoramas is still well into the single digits, their preparation took a surprising bulk of the time. Even using PTGUI, getting a pano just right could take an entire day.

I've stitched a few image pairs together before, but this weekend I completed my first cylindrical projection, 197° horizontal field of view over five images, using PTGUI to handle the stitching.

After the quality problems I had with my previous stitching attempts (one using Hugin, another using a trial version of PTGUI), I had been expecting not to generate particularly good results. I managed to pleasantly surprise myself, however, and without checking against the master stitching file, I can't find the seams in the result anymore, and I'm satisfied with the overall output quality. On top of that, the sepia version of a two-image stitch I did last week is going to end up in my collection as one of my best images yet.

Out of a total of 28 images this batch, 19 were kept, but none were really much above snapshot quality. This does mean that I am finally getting to the Washington pictures, however.

I finally got around to finishing and uploading the San Juan Bautista pictures. From 39 exposures, there were 25 surviving images, and no candidates for Scenes.

A comparison was made at DPReview of the new 24-105 f/4 with the 24-70 f/2.8L, the 35 f/1.4L, the 70-200 f/2.8L, and the 70-300 DO IS lenses.

Quick summary of results:

The 24-105 is not so good at 24, spectacular from 35-50 (even matching the prime), good at 70 (better than the 24-70), and not so good at 105. It's stronger overall than the 24-70 from 35-70, but weaker at the wide-angle side.

Given these results, my own personal thoughts are that the availability of IS on this lens still makes it a better choice than the 24-70 for general walkaround use, despite the high cost ($1,250 at B&H), and weakness on either end of the zoom range, and inability to reach f/2.8. It creates an excellent overlap on a full-frame camera with the Canon 16-35 and the Sigma 80-400. The 24-70 f/2.8 may still be better for indoor shooting.

Hurricane Katrina has greatly increased the population of both LSU and Baton Rouge in general. Not all of the newcomers are human. On the way home from work today, I encountered a not quite full grown calico kitten that I had never seen before, watching me warily from a distance. I managed to get off a few quick snapshots before someone approached it from the other side and it ran off.

Shortly afterwards, a rescue helicopter passed almost directly overhead.

I have finally finished the editing and upload of all of the pictures from the June 14 outing to Sequoia and King's Canyon National Park, including the short stop at Casa de Fruta before travelling. We didn't cover the entire park, just the Grant Grove and Giant Forest portions, but the result was 401 pictures, of which 208 were kept, and 6 made it into the Scenes collection.

Direct links to the specific galleries:

1. Casa de Fruta
2. Grant Grove
3. Giant Forest

An engineer-photographer in the Netherlands has built a portable laser-triggered platform for capturing insects in flight. The resulting pictures are quite spectacular.

Link credit to Pharyngula.