Trivia that matter
I spent the morning at Wichita State University taking pictures of the sculptures littering the campus. Here are a few; there are some more at my Flickr site. These are all crossview stereo. To view them, cross your eyes until you see three images, then focus on the middle image. Click on them to see them at larger sizes.
More fun with focus stacks in stereo. This one is composed from 58 images in two stacks. It’s a cross-view stereo, i.e., the right eye focuses on the left image and the left eye on the right. Cross-view images are not as comfortable to view as parallel-view, in which the left eye focuses on the left image,1 but they can be much larger.
You can view this at various sizes by clicking on the picture or opening it in a new window. At the largest size (1920 pixels wide) it probably won’t all fit on your monitor, but you will be able to see the upper half in great detail.
… and you can see this zinnia in three dimensions.
I was disappointed that Rory Mercury wasn’t at the anime convention today. Sailor Mercury was there, though, as was One Punch [Wo]man.
There are a bunch more pictures that will take some time to go through.
Update: I’ve edited as many as I’m going to. As usual, the organizers did their damnedest to make taking pictures difficult, and none that I took are any better than snapshots. You can see them all here.
I’m tired of seeing that ugly car first thing every time I check my website, so here is the last poppy picture of the year. Below is the first nine o’clock picture. (The common name of Mirabilis jalapa is “four o’clock,” but heat and daylight “savings” time means that they don’t open until around nine in the evening during Kansas summers.)
For those interested in technical stuff: the top picture was assembled in Helicon Focus from 36 separate f/11 images. The bottom picture is a single shot at f/16.
Or scrap metal?
This elegant vehicle has graced the neighborhood for at least six months now.
Summer is here. Soon Tribulus terrestris will cover sidewalks. Cenchrus longispinus, pictured, one of the less-beloved members of the Poaceae, is already making its presence felt.
In the field, stacked focus close-up photography is iffy. Sometimes you get good results, but usually there’s too much wind, the light is constantly changing, or it’s impossible to control the lens with sufficient accuracy to get a workable stack of a botanical subject.
It’s much easier to do indoors, where there is no wind, you can control the light and background, and you have a focusing rail handy. The picture of the very three-dimensional Nigella damascena above was assembled in Helicon Focus from 110 separate f/11 images and has a total depth of field of roughly three inches — not bad for a macro. (Click the image to see it larger; right-click and open in a new window to see it at full size.)
If 110 slices at f/11 sounds excessive, you’re right. Here’s another picture of the same flower composed from a stack of 31 images:
Snapshots from the past few weeks, taken with my little go-everywhere camera.
Inside the burger joint.
… so here’s a California bluebell, Phacelia campanularia.
It’s recital season, and I spent a chunk of this weekend taking too many pictures at a ballet school’s dress rehearsal. Here are a couple of them. There are about 260 more to run through Photoshop.
One way to display a panorama without using 360Cities:
Clicking on the picture (if you’re using an older version of Safari) or the title in the lower left will take you to its Flickr page, where you should see it at a much larger size.
Update: This panorama is now an “Editor’s Pick” at 360Cities. Here it is using their embed code:
You can see another, rather different one of my panoramas at the bottom of their homepage.
This past week has been a bit too eventful for my taste, but I did get a chance to stop for lunch at one of the better fast-food places in town.
We had a brown Christmas here this past winter. We’re going to make up for that with a white Easter tomorrow, or so the weatherman says, with one to three inches of anthropogenic global warming falling after midnight.
Today was the first time in nearly three weeks that the wind wasn’t furiously howling all day long. I was finally able to get out to the botanical garden to take some pictures.
Here’s a handy schedule of expected cherry blossom bloom times, in case you should be heading to Japan during the next few months. If you can’t go to Japan, you can visit the botanical garden in Wichita, where the Okame cherry, above, has just started flowering.
The Japanese apricot is in full bloom now. Thanks to new construction and landscaping, it is no longer possible to get close to tree, but you don’t need to get close to appreciate its powerful fragrance.
From tonight’s dress rehearsal of The Firebird.
I spent the evening photographing a tech rehearsal for a dance program. Here are three of the pictures. There are about 1600 more to go through. The dress rehearsal is Thursday, and I’ll probably take at least as many more then.
I did some preliminary spring cleaning in the tiny garden out front, and kept one of the plumes from the clump of ornamental grass (Miscanthus sinensis?) to give Helicon Focus a workout. The picture above was composed from 48 slices and has a depth of field of about three inches.
… but there was some color at the botanical garden yesterday.
This afternoon in the cathedral.