Panoramas
Related to the previous post:
The marriage of geekdom and photography comes alive when trying to assemble several photos into a panorama. I have several methods of doing this, all of which suck. They generally get the whole “stitching the pictures together” thing right, but often the blending of the different sky colours or exposures just doesn’t work right at all. So then I discover Autopano, Hugin (using panotools) and enblend.
These tools really do absolutely kick arse. Enblend in particular is an amazing bit of work - seamlessly blending different colours based on some maths that I don’t imagine I could understand without some serious bit of work. You essentially have the freedom to take a huge number of photos covering a large area and it’ll just figure out how to join them all together. Very clever.