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Here is the last plane of the summer season of 2008-2009 at the South Pole. It is a Hercules LC-130, fondly called a "skier" or a "Herc" by the folks at the Pole. The LC-130's are the work horses of Antarctica, bringing fuel, supplies and mail to Pole. This plane will fly off in just a few minutes with the last half dozen folks left over from our summer crew, leaving only the winter crew members behind.
You can't help but notice all the cloudy material in this photograph. Some of it is water vapor produced by the power plant. But most of the cloud is from the plane. With temperatures in the -50's F, contrails have become a big problem. Late in October or early in November, we will see our next plane. Until then, there is no mail, no fuel delivery or supplies and no new people. Now we get to work to winterize the station and then, with everything put away, we will wait for sunset and 6 months of darkness. It is going to be a very interesting winter. The 23 images of this panorama were photographed with a Nikon D80 and stitched with Autopano Pro. |
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looking out from my apartment over the rooftops of SoHo towards lower Manhattan. The twin towers would have been pretty much in the center of this picture, beyond the large buildings in the back. |
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started shooting panoramas in 1985 and found to be very interesting the next ten years i shot 10 more pans with my old canon a f series 300 mm lens each panorama consists of 17 35 mm frames scanned and stitched on photo shop the result is a 20 year old GigaPan |
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In this Gigapan you see people has come out of their homes for shopping. This is the day before the new year in Iran and people are very happy. The cars were almost unable to move in Sattar Khan St, because people are almost everywhere.
Nowrūz (Persian: نوروز /noʊruz/ ↔ [noʊɾuːz]; Kurdish: نهورۆز; with various local pronunciations and spellings, meaning 'New Day') is the traditional Iranian new year holiday celebrated by Iranian people and initiated in Ancient Iran. Apart from Iran, the holiday is celebrated in many other parts of the world (specifically countries or regions that belonged to the Greater Iran such as Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Kurdish southeast of Turkey) including parts of West Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, Northwestern China, the Caucasus, the Crimea, Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo and the Republic of Macedonia. Nowruz marks the first day of spring and the beginning of the Iranian year. It is celebrated on the day of the astronomical vernal equinox (the start of spring in the northern hemisphere), which usually occurs on March 21 or the previous/following day depending on where it is observed. As well as being a Zoroastrian holiday and having significance amongst the Zoroastrian ancestors of modern Iranian, it is also a holy day for Alawites, Alevis, Nizari Ismaili Muslims and adherents of the Bahá'í Faith. (( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowruz )) |
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Shot from our 20th floor terrace. Seventy someodd images. |
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New Lanark is a former cotton mill "model village" built at the end of the 18th beginning 19th Century.
http://www.newlanark.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Lanark Famous resident was the socially enlightened Robert Owen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Owen Who advocated being nice to people. |
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This is a yet another redo of a previous gigapan, as I corrected the white balance. The camera was (mis-)set to 7500°, I corrected it in Lightroom A few notes on how this was done, and why there are some funky edges on 7x7 image. Kit: Epic 100, Olympus E510, 40-150 lens, 150mm (35mm: 300mm) No tripods are allowed on the Observatory Deck of the Empire State Building, both as a safety requirement and to cut down on photographers heading up there with their view cameras or gigapans on a nice day and hogging all the good corners. :-) This means that you can't use a gigapan, since it is not something that you can hand-hold. Being the ornery person I am, I searched for an alternative. I got around this by using a monopod with base feet, a Manfrotto unit that I had picked up years and years ago and only recently discovered actually had the feet, which are nothing more than steel rods, threaded to fit into screwed sockets at the base to provide a modicum of support. I wrote the corporation that runs the Empire State Building if this was acceptable, but received no answer, so when I was recently in New York, I simply went there. I passed through security with no problem, with the head of security commenting that a monopod was allowable. I then set up the Epic 100 at the top of the Empire State Building on the monopod. While the unit is impressively stable compared to not having base feet at all, it does sway quite a bit if left to its own devices. Hence I made sure to brace the monopod as well as I could, trying to keep the balance centered on the unit, but found that I need a lot more practice to get this down right. Hence I stopped the first one I did (and erased it from the card) and upped the FOV so that I would get a fair amount of overlap to compensate for the swaying of the gigapan, which does generate a fair amount of torque when tranversing rows or columns. So, that's the secret of how to do a gigapan where no tripods are allowed: use something that isn't a tripod, but pretends to be. |
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Ever since I saw miao's GigaPan of "A city near Route 80" (http://www.gigapan.org/alpha/gigapans/15148/) I've been salivating at the chance to get back to Garrett Mountain to shoot a massive GigaPan from the same vantage point. The spot is very well suited for GigaPanning - an overlook with an unobstructed view and plenty of detail that ought to be highly explorable. What more could I ask for?
Better weather. Unfortunately the day that I finally got out there to shoot this monster turned out to be the kind of day that drives a GigaPanner to tears - partly cloudy skies - tantalizing stretches of clear blue sky punctuated by white puffy clouds whose devestating effects on the lighting of the scene belie their benign outward appearance. With over 1000 input images this GigaPan took well over an hour to capture. Naturally, the mostly sunny conditions that I set up for lasted just long enough to convince me that they would prevail, but by the time the bulk of the foreground shots were being snapped the conditions had morphed to mostly cloudy and the resulting shots ended up pretty underexposed. What can you do? It wasn't a complete waste. I had a great conversation with a couple of passing bikers who were quite interested in the GigaPan technology (and far more knowledgable about it than your average passerby), and ultimately, despite the suboptimal exposures, the GigaPan Stitcher software took it all in stride and behaved like a trooper, outputting the largest GigaPan I've yet successfully stitched. I'm sure there'll still be plenty to explore and discover, but I'm still hoping that someday I'll have an opportunity to get back there and shoot this scene under better weather conditions. |
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The fall foliage of late September and early October brings leaf peepers to the roads of New England. These curious folks, whether driving themselves along the winding roads of the Green Mountains or riding a tour bus through the Berkshires, are looking for colorful leaves and maybe some New England products for home. The orange sugar maples, yellow birches and maroon oak trees provided a very nice show in Weston Vermont today. This store had pumpkins and other interesting items for sale.
Although outlet stores have recently invaded the bucolic New England landscape, there are still plenty of roadside farm stands and little stores that sell local produce, crafts and antiques. Maple syrup and Vermont cheese are popular with tourists and local folks year-round. Hay bales and pumpkins are very popular this time of year. This particular store in Weston VT is still a local establishment, but it has grown considerably over the decades. With internet and catalog sales, they aren't really a local road-side store anymore, but they still maintain a New England theme. The store did such a nice job getting into the rustic Vermont-in the fall spirit with their old truck, pumpkins, hay bales and hammocks that I though a gigapan was needed to capture the scene. So here it is, complete with some leaf peepers. The 21 images of this panorama were photographed with a Nokon D80 and stitched with Autopano Pro. |
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