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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by John Reid (talk | contribs) at 18:43, 19 February 2006 (deleting old & cleanup). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

If I did something wrong, sorry. I edit at random; please link to any page you want to discuss.

My RfA

Thank you Hello John Reid, and thank you for your support in my request for adminship! It passed with a final count of 63/4/3. I am honoured by the community support and pledge to serve the project as best as I can. CanadianCaesar The Republic Restored 16:49, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Eek! A mouse! EEEK! Get-the-broom-hit-it-hit-it-hit-it-eeeeeeek!

Oh. Sorry. Congratulations. Don't make any cheesy rollbacks. John Reid 05:44, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Panoramas

Hi, John. Thanks for taking a crack at it. The images aren't low quality, I just made a low quality snapshot of the bad panorama, so that you could see the problem. I took them with an 8MP camera, so I think they're pretty good. They're not tiffs, just jpgs at the highest setting. I uploaded some different images for you to try. The problem is more severe with them, but it would be a far more useful panorama to have. If it doesn't work, I can find some pictures that are not very bad but would still be good to have. I'm going offline in a minute, so I might not get back to you right away. Thank you very much, Kjkolb 10:20, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

• Image:DavisDam1.jpg
• Image:DSCN0172.JPG (forgot to rename it)

Okay; this took me about 20 min of Photoshop time, not counting wrench-twiddling. Not much point investing real effort in it but you can see what can be done.

Problems with these images include color balance and rotate; you may also have chosen the incorrect focal length leading to geometric distortion. All these errors are slight and mostly correctable or unnoticeable. Next time you shoot, use a tripod with a smooth pan head and be absolutely sure it's level and firmly seated before starting the series. Use a cable release; go full manual on all controls and don't reset them between shots for any reason. (Unless you're going to try to pan around from a distant scene to a foreground, you madman.) The lens issue is something else; at bottom there is no perfect resolution to the problem, just as the round Earth can never be mapped properly on flat paper. Stick to distant subjects and a long lens; keep the number of degrees of pan between images low.

Much more serious is the problem of excessive overlap. You did not pan sufficiently between the two images, so they contain largely the same scene. It's probably better to aim for a 20-30% overlap instead of the 70% you have here. Any amount of effort welding the panorama is wasted for the small payoff.

Another issue is the water in the scene. I ran the seam down a wide stretch of foreground water rather than through the rocks to the left. The water moves; but the rocks are in the foreground and the relative pincushion distortion is extreme. Everything considered, the test is not too bad. But water in motion is never going to match up very well; it's different in every shot. Key to this kind of work is to run the seam through less-detailed areas. Note that I've avoided entirely the complex control structure and gone through the dam proper; where the weld is nearly invisible. (By the way, what look like very obvious welds are actually reflections of the control structure; the actual seam runs between them.)

If you're not going to reshoot, you need to select pairs or triples of shots that maintain proper overlap of about 20%; with that overlap avoiding as much as possible complex detail, including water and absolutely all motion (such as the bobbing warning buoy line in the middleground). Assuming the color balance, skew, pincushion, and rotate errors aren't any worse than in the test sources, welding should work out fine.

One problem you may have with my work is that you seem to have even larger images on hand. I don't quite understand all your comment, but that's what I read from it. I can manipulate large images but I have trouble compressing them to HVS ProJPEG. We might want to drag another party into this end of the job; or you can try your hand yourself. Please remember that you'll get fairly fine quality from reasonable compression ratios. Each of your source files weighs in at over 5 Mb; that's probably excessive for upload to WP. If I hadn't scaled it down, the test file might have come to about 350K. If you're giving me the best possible starting file, that's fine; I don't mind. But when the work is done and ready to convert, best we keep the file size within sane bounds. John Reid 08:37, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Thank you

Hello John Reid, thank you for you support in my RfA. I was promoted with a final count of 48/1/0! If you see me making any mistakes, let me know ASAP. -- WB 02:29, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

You're wasting time thanking me instead of working that broom. That's one. Now get back to work. John Reid 06:42, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

My RfA

Hi John,

Just a quick (belated) note to express my thanks for your support in my RfA. You are right about images in sigs - WP:SIG makes this quite clear and I have altered my sig accordingly.

Anyway, as it stands I have around 70%, so I'll need a few more supports in order to get admin status. I have been quite disappointed that most of those in opposition seem to have disregarded the sentiments on my user page - but hey, that's life.

Thank you again for your support! DJR (Talk) 11:45, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

We need admins of all kinds, not just nice guys. You're confrontational, which makes some enemies. If you do make admin I hope you'll moderate; if you don't, you may not be effective. Try to remember that adminship doesn't actually give anyone more power; it only gives an admin a broom and a slightly amplified voice. Everything you do is still subject to consensus, which you cannot form alone.

If you do fail this RfA, please let me suggest you be extremely patient before self-renominating. If you have merit somebody else will recognize it. Meanwhile, you needn't moderate your position on any issue -- but you might try moderating your tone. It's wonderfully effective to do so. John Reid 18:34, 19 February 2006 (UTC)