Yesterday we published this picture of Robin Hill—
—with a bit of a story about how the picture was made. It was stitched together from three separate photographs, but trying to do it automatically flummoxed the stitching software and, as Father Pitt said at the time, “produced a comical monstrosity reminiscent of Frank Gehry.”
In a comment, Von Hindenburg writes,
I think that I speak for many of your readers when I say that I’d like to see the Gehryesque nightmare as an example of the process that you go through to share these images.
How many of those readers do share that desire will never really be known, but old Pa Pitt is always happy to oblige even one of them.
These were the three original photographs:
This is what the Hugin software—which is normally very good at its job—did with them:
Father Pitt then tried the experiment of putting together only the left and center photographs, which worked perfectly. But trying to add that combined picture to the third one made a different but equally comical mess. The only thing to do was to put in the control points—points of identity between the pictures—by hand. Normally Father Pitt would just give up before doing that, but he was feeling stubborn, and he thought he might get a picture he liked.
Now you know a little about how old Pa Pitt normally does otherwise impossibly wide-angled pictures of buildings. Usually it is a matter of pressing a couple of buttons and letting the machine do the work, then tweaking the results. Once in a while, though, it involves what almost feels like honest labor, which is against our usual principles, but may be indulged in on rare occasions.
One response to “The Gehryesque Nightmare”
Thank you for sharing this! To me it just looks like a different approach to handling a hilly Pittsburgh lot, taken by a builder who didn’t want one side of his house to be three stories and the other six.