Bi-Weekly Photo: Arc de Triomphe

During my road trip in the summer I experimeted a bit with my camera. I wanted to try panorama photography, and the Place Charles de Gaulle in Paris seemed turned out to be a pretty good setting.

This is my first attempt at making a panorama photo. I stiched 16 pictures together with a piece of software called Hugin, trying to cut out as many cars as possible from each picture. Since the Place Charles de Gaulle is a huge intersection, it wasn't an easy task, and I couldn't remove every car, but I got close enough.
I also haven't gotten a hang of all the software's parameters yet, so the angle is a bit off (as you can see by the round upper edge of the Arc de Triomphe), but overall I'm quite happy about the result.

Timelapse: Paris, France - Segovia, Spain

EDIT: Hint: If you just want to see the video, skip to the bottom of this post.

The bad quality of my posts about Japan is a very good example of why I shouldn't try to do anything creative at night after long trips. Still, I couldn't resist browsing through the pictures we took during our trip for the timelapse video tonight (after a 6 hour long drive). And of course, after looking at the pictures, I wasn't going to go to bed. I ended up making the entire video between 2:00 and 4:30 (AM).

First things first, here's our setup (if you didn't read the last posts, i'm currently on a road trip with my brother):

We used a small 720p Webcam, which we attached to the car using our extensive mechanical engineering knowledge and duct tape.

On the software side, we were running a small program named fswebcam on linux. If anyone is interested, here's the bash script I wrote so I didn't have to type in everything every time I wanted to start recording:

 #!/bin/bash  
 FOLDER=timelapse3s  
 if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then  
     echo "Usage: $0 <video device>"  
 else  
     if [ ! -d $FOLDER ]; then  
         mkdir $FOLDER  
     fi  
     fswebcam --no-banner --jpeg 95 --loop 3 -S 6 -r 1280x720 -d $1 $FOLDER/timelapse-%Y%m%d-%H%M%S.jpg  
 fi  

I cut the video with kdenlive. It can import a bunch of images as a video natively, but it's not very efficient at it, an my netbook is not that powerful, so I decided to merge all the images into a video first and then just edit that with kdenlive. To do that (without losing quality) you can use ffmpeg and select mjpeg as the video codec:

ffmpeg -f image2 -r 8 -i %d.jpg -vcodec mjpeg video.mp4 

I don't remember where I got this from, but it works. Your files have to be renamed first, so that ffmpeg finds them using the format string passed in the -i parameter. I also made a script for that:

 #!/bin/bash  
 if [ $# -ne 2 ]||[ ! -d $1 ]||[ -e $2 ]; then  
     echo "Usage: $0 <input_dir> <output_dir>"  
     echo " <output_dir> must not exist"  
 else  
     mkdir "$2"  
     COUNTER=0  
     for file in $(ls "$1")  
     do 
         cp "$1/$file" "$2/$COUNTER.jpg"  
         COUNTER=$(($COUNTER+1))  
     done  
 fi  

 

So, without further ado, here's the video. I hope you like it!


In case you don't like the embedded player, click here

PS: Here's where I got the music from: http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/4402/outsider

Road Trip

Like last year, my brother and I decided to make a road trip from Germany to Spain. Last year we only stopped to take turns driving, and didn't enjoy the trip itself to the fullest. This time, we wanted to change that, so we stopped and stayed in Paris for the night. We also attached a webcam to the car to "document" our trip with a timelapse video. We have over 20000 stills that have to be merged, cut and edited, so until then, here are some photos I took with the other camera:

 

My brother and me at the Trocadero in Paris

 

Notre Dame -- Taken from the car while driving by

 

Nice sunset somewhere in south France