A Wigglegram of Three Lovely Ladies in Kimono at the Kyoto Imperial Palace
Lovely Day at the Kyoto Imperial Palace these young ladies were quite the attraction for photo ops -- Kyoto Imperial Palace (京都御所) -- Kyoto, Japan -- Copyright 2014 Jeffrey Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 — 1/2500 sec, f/2.5, ISO 100 — map & image datanearby photos
Lovely Day at the Kyoto Imperial Palace
these young ladies were quite the attraction for photo ops

I visited the Kyoto Imperial Palace for the first time yesterday, and these three young college students also enjoying the sites were kind enough to pose for a wigglegram for me. The frame above is the last in the series, after they broke out in a smile at the rapid-fire sound of my camera capturing frames at the zippy pace of 10 per second.

昨日京都御所でこの大学生美人達はポーズしてくれて、僕はウイグルグラムを作りました。以下写真の上にマウスをあっちこっちしてね!

Here's the wigglegram:

Animatable Wigglegram (16 frames) — slowly sweep mouse from side to side to view 3D effect
写真の上をマウスで左右にゆっくり動かすと「3D」な感じが出ます。

Kimono are almost always photogenic, which is why they tend to appear in my wigglegrams, such as this one and this one.

Because the individual frames are taken manually (as I sweep myself and the camera from one side to the other while the camera fires a burst of 10 to 20 frames), they're all jumbled and misaligned, so before a wigglegram can be made I must somehow line them all up. This is a royal pain to try to do manually in Lightroom, so for a while I had a system where I used some features of the Hugin photo stitcher that sometimes worked like magic, but more often gave unusable Salvador-Dali like results.

So I finally bit the bullet and dusted off my trigonometry and built a Lightroom plugin that allows me to straight and crop the group automatically. The concept was simple, I thought, but it turns out that converting natural thoughts of alignment and rotation do not map at all to how Lightroom does it internally, and wrapping my brain around it enough to bridge the gap was one of the hardest, most frustrating things I've attempted in a very long time. Frankly, my brain is just not cut out for math. (This, despite my undergraduate degree officially being in math.)

Anyway, the upshot is that now there's much less friction for me to make wigglegrams, so I plan to post more of them.

Continued here (with another wigglegram, no less)...


One comment so far...

Thanks for sharing your photos! It’s always nice to see Japan as I always wanted to go back there at some point. Fall foliage is always awesome and your shots are always great.

Alvin from NYC.

— comment by Alvin on November 7th, 2014 at 3:39am JST (9 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink
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