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.

Please pardon the somewhat rambling writing; I'm simultaneously exhausted and jittery. A visit to the woman who makes my life worth living is long overdue, and as a result my rather sporadic updates as of late are likely to become even more so for the next two weeks.

I can never sleep the night before a flight. I don't know why. It might be partly historical; I remember once upon a time trying deliberately not to sleep ahead of a long flight, so that it would be easier to sleep on the plane, and thus make the period of enforced inactivity easier to bear. Now it just seems to fade into the background of my general insomnia, a habit too well ingrained to break when my body actually wants to encourage it for me.

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.

In the continuing Gulf Storm Saga, Rita took out power for longer than Katrina did, but I'm back up and running about a day later. It's making me seriously consider buying a generator if another storm comes through. Local damage is slightly worse as well, as a number of fires have apparently broken out throughout the city. I was out and about throughout the day escaping the powerless apartment, and fire engines were a common sight — one set stopping at a gated community just a few blocks away from my own apartment complex.

My paranoid side wonders if it was due to people's individual generators catching fire. There are some drawbacks to storing ten gallons of gasoline in your apartment, after all.

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 security problem in the version of Drupal I was running finally prompted me to spend the day upgrading the system to the new 4.6 series. The good things: the new trackback anti-spam system is working very well, so trackbacks have been re-enabled. The new image system is much less buggy than it used to be, and in particular, resizing properly happens only in one direction now. Access permissions specific to taxonomy terms are actually working now, so works of fiction are now only accessible to users who are logged in (at Lynne's long request). There's now a type of node for storing recipes, should that become of interest. Nodes can now accept arbitrary files as attachments. The image filter actually works now, making it easier to publish linked thumbnails.

The pictures from Grant Grove, combined with the Casa de Fruta pictures, comprise the first half of the June 14 photographs. Despite how long it is taking me, I am getting faster, and I learned a lot about color adjustment from this last batch, which is why the shots after about #60 or so look significantly more vibrant than the earlier ones.

I took pictures of a hot air balloon festival today, and a fireworks show immediately after. I took 548 shots before running out of memory, and thus missed the grand finale. I'm tempted to go buy a larger card, and use my current card as a backup, but I'm already shooting far faster than I can process the images.

I don't really want to shoot less, so this means that I need a better workflow, which in turn means that I need to stop trying to process all of my images by hand. I need to play with automatic conversion to jpg from Adobe Bridge, and also start trying to fine-tune the jpg output from my camera so that some images can stand with no editing whatsoever.

I've survived my trip. I expect I'll be making a number of personal entries over the next couple weeks, in between processing photos. I haven't done a complete count yet, but my first order estimate is about 1300 photographs.

It's strange to be back at the computer. I've been away from tech long enough that the mouse and keyboard feel a little unfamiliar and slow under my hands.

Later, though. I'm tired, sweaty, and I never did travel well.