Adventures in Panorama, Checkerboard Edition

I regaled my weekend audience with the results of my attempt to learn how to do panoramic photos using Photoshop. In a nutshell, you can take several pictures from left to right and then stitch them together horizontally or you can take several pictures from bottom to top and stitch them together vertically. But then I wondered: can I take a grid of pictures and stitch them together both horizontally and vertically? Just how smart is Photoshop, anyway?

Pretty smart! I tried it out today with a 2×6 grid of our new kitchen remodel and Photoshop breezed through it:

The red area is the best I could do with a single shot using the 24mm setting on my camera, and a wall prevented me from moving backward. The only two ways to show the whole kitchen are (a) purchasing a pro camera body and a $3,000 prime 12mm wide-angle lens or (b) using Photoshop. I think my choice was pretty obvious.

Panoramic stitching works best with, you know, panoramas. That is, scenes that are fairly distant, so that the distortion isn’t too bad to begin with and can be corrected fairly easily. Interior scenes are a whole different thing, and there’s really no way to avoid distortion entirely when objects are so close. You can see it in this picture in various places because I had to pick and choose which distortions to try and correct. I’m sure a pro could do better, but it’s not possible to correct everything. Also, I probably should have taken the picture in the morning to get truer, less ruddy lighting.

Anyway . . . green lower cabinets and cream upper cabinets. Some kind of engineered quartz stuff for the countertop, which is white with light gray flecks. New flooring throughout the entire house, a light brownish-gray that has coloring similar to old reclaimed wood. And a bunch of new appliances. Marian managed the whole operation, and my main contribution was the suggestion of green for the lower cabinets.

You love it, don’t you? You better. All negative comments will be ruthlessly deleted.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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