A Year's Walk Through the Neighborhood

A major project for 2012 was taking the photographs for a one-year zoomwalk through my neighborhood. This video is constructed from 1,768 photos taken between January 1st and December 31st, 2012. The date each photo was taken is in the lower right-hand corner of the frame.

I took two steps between photos, and shot between 6 and 10 photos per day. Also, I was away for several one to two week periods during the year. As you might suspect, despite my efforts, taking photographs in small chunks on separate days or even weeks increases the "wiggle" of the video. Going around curves was tricky, and I learned to take only one step per photo in such situations.

Note that the year started with three Christmas Pigs in the yard, but ended with four.

If you would like to see the video in its full resolution (1280 x 720), click here (you will be taken to the Vimeo web site).



Technique Tweaks
I mostly recently discussed the frame alignment and morphing techniques used in this earlier post. Since then, there's been one major tweak to the frame alignment algorithm.

Last year, for a sequence of photos 1-2-3-4-5-6, photo #2 would be an anchor to which #1 and #3 would be compared, #5 would be an anchor to which #4 and #6 would be compared, and so forth. The choice of anchors was fixed and immutable. Now, the anchors are chosen based on prior results. For example, let's say that the comparison of #3 to the anchor, #2,  succeeded; then the next anchor would still be #5 (to compare #4 and #6 against). But if the alignment of #3 and #2 failed -- the change to #3 was too great -- then the next anchor is #4, not #5. Photos #3 and #5 would be compared to #4. Thus there is a second chance to align #3 to an adjacent photo if the first attempt fails. With this improvement, fully half of the photos in this zoomwalk were aligned.

And here is a photo to feed a thumbnail to the Recent Posts and Popular Posts widgets.