A few weeks ago, Microsoft Photosynth hit the Net. A few of the blogs I follow talked about it, and it looked interesting. I had some time during my conference in Phoenix, so I made a “synth” of my room at the Westin Kierland Resort in Scottsdale, AZ. I downloaded the PDF synth guide with instructions for making a new synth, and set about shooting the room. I wound up with 78 photos.
I shot them in RAW, so I exported them from Lightroom 2 and then started the upload process. This is where my frustration started. It took over 4 hours to upload those pictures. Luckily I had other things to do, like go to the pool and then a dinner engagement, so I left to do that.
When I came back after dinner, the little green box said it was done, and that my photos were “58% synthy”. Whatever that means. I proceeded to load the synth, and was not pleased with the results. For whatever reason, I had expected this to work like other synths I had seen, that acted like a virtual walk-through. I took pictures of the room, the balcony, and the bathroom. I took “approach” photos that I thought my be what synth needed to construct the next scene in the walkthrough. It didn’t do any of this.
You are probably asking why I did all this, and expected a result other than what I achieved. Fair enough. It’s because the PDF instruction set didn’t have specific directions for how to do this. In the absence of those directions, I made an assumption. I wonder how many other people are experiencing this.
Oh well. I don’t really see an application for this anyway. You have to download software to even view these things. When you consider that Flash is on 99% of computers out there, it makes more sense to do virtual tour types of things in Flash than this thing. It’s a solution without a problem.
Apparently, someone I really respect agrees it isn’t ready for widespread usage.
. I love this program…
Funny coincidences
Sometimes I think I am a crazy person for believing in some of my photographs the way I do. Take this one for example. It is a crop of a larger image, but there were some things in the larger one that I didn’t like. Rather than editing them out and going through all that (which I deperately need to learn how to do better), I just cropped the image down to the piece I liked. Unfortunately, that operation left the Saguaro cactus in the middle of the image. In all of the images I have seen of Arizona, I can’t really say that I have seen any others like this. Which made me think I was crazy for liking it.
Fast forward to this past weekend. I was reading a book on exposure, and lo and behold, the other had taken a similar image in Arizona. Going through the book more, I saw other shots similar in nature to the ones I had come up with all on my own. Knowing what the publishing cycle is like, I know this guy was there before me. But we saw similar things. That is really encouraging to me. To see similar photos published in a book alleviates any thoughts of being crazy. It reinforces my thought that I might know at least a little bit about what I am doing.
BTW – watch for the book review soon, I am almost done with it. And not too soon – I have 3 more books coming in from Amazon this week.