Photo gallery – Page 3 – Zoopraxiscope

Under the rainbow

It looked like spring would arrive early this year, but that was before 22 inches of global warming fell. The snow is finally gone, but Wichita is still mostly brown. I figure that it will be another week or two before trees leaf out. I went to the botanical garden yesterday and found very little color aside from pansies and daffodils. The lenten rose, above, was the highlight of the trip. The Corylus avellana was in full bloom; look closely to spot the female flowers.

The most colorful item there was the gateway to the children’s garden, below.

Children's garden entrance in Wichita

The okame cherry was showing some pink in its buds. There might be a few flowers opening during the coming week and perhaps more than a few next Saturday. (It’s already cherry blossom season in Japan. Here’s the blooming forecast, should you be planning a trip there soon. (Via J. Greely.))

Update: the panorama works particularly well as a “little planet.”

Stonehenge Lite

We got six inches more snow yesterday, which makes 20 inches since Thursday. I took the scenic route to work this morning, passing by the “standing stones” in a nearby park.

Update: Here’s the panorama. Right-click and pick “little planet” for a different kind of view.

Standing Stones in Riverside Park in USA

This was assembled with Panorama Studio Pro. Hugin, which I had been using, is free, but it’s finicky, and I got tired of constantly finding and editing control points and still getting glitchy output. I also considered PTGui Pro. It has more features than Panorama Studio, notably HDR support, but it didn’t do quite as good a job stitching images together in my tests (though both worked much better than Hugin), and it costs twice as much.

Playing with a new toy

Let’s run a few raws and HDR stacks through Photomatix. ((Yeah, still more cathedral pictures. I did these at lunch yesterday, and these are what I have on hand at the office.))

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First color

I rode out to the botanical garden this afternoon to find that it’s closed on Sundays until April. My irritation was slightly allayed by discovering a Japanese apricot in full, fragrant bloom.

Snapshots, with Bach

The renovations at the Catholic cathedral in Wichita are finally complete, and it reopens Saturday. Here is a slide show of some recent pictures I took there.

The music is from the Open Goldberg Variations.

Update: Here’s the cathedral with people inside:

Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, reopened in USA

Looking up

I got myself a late little Christmas present, a (not quite) cheap Korean 8mm lens, and I’m seeing what I can do with 180°. The picture above of the full length of the Wichita cathedral’s ceiling is essentially a single frame. ((To be precise, It’s three exposures combined via Photoshop’s HDR function, but they’re stacked on top of each other, so to speak, rather than stitched side-by-side into a panorama. Each exposure contained the entire ceiling.)) The lens is manual focus, but that hardly matters: set the focus to two or three feet, and at f8 the depth of field contains the whole world.

Using the new lens, I did successfully make a spherical panorama, without the tripod visible, with just seven exposures. It’s not really difficult, but it’s not quite as easy as Florian Knorn would have you believe, at least with the freeware I use.

Backwards into the past

I was active for many years in the Society for Creative Anachronism. My interests were music, dance and costuming. However, the emphasis in the local group was on fighting, more fighting, still more fighting, and a bit of politics. I eventually got very thoroughly burnt-out, and I hadn’t been to an event in years until yesterday.

The Kingdom of Calontir (roughly, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa, plus Fayetteville, Arkansas, minus westernmost Nebraska) held its winter coronation at a school within trivial bicycle distance of where I live. So I grabbed my camera and spent a couple of hours there yesterday afternoon taking pictures of all the strange people.

Here are a few of the pictures I took. There are many more in the gallery here. (The photo plugin I’m currently using reduces the size of the image to fit the browser window. To see the pictures full-size, right-click to open the link in a new window.)

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Almost done

St. Mary Cathedral, with pews in in USA

Renovations are nearly finished at the cathedral. Here’s a “spherical” panorama, with lots of glitches and bits of tripod legs, composited from 77 separate frames. When the construction is finally complete, I plan to rent a fisheye lens and see if I can make panoramas that stitch together better.

360°

Cathedral renovations in USA

Some of the niftiest software is free. For instance, Hugin, which stitches 360° panoramas together from your pictures. You can then upload the panoramas to 360 Cities for everyone to explore. The basic membership there is also free. The above is the interior of the Wichita cathedral last week.

Although the ideal camera for making panoramas is a full-frame DSLR with a fisheye lens, any camera that isn’t junk will work, possibly even cellphone cameras. Those who travel to picturesque places might want to keep an eye out for possible panoramas.

Fish music

Roger Netherton, a young friend of mine, placed second this year in the old-time fiddle contest at Winfield Friday. He celebrated by heading over to Carp Camp, where he led the assembled eccentrics in a couple of tunes. Here’s the first. It starts off with Roger alone.

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/Carp1-2012.mp3]

There are more pictures of carp people below the fold.

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Winfield 2012

Here are a few snapshots from the weekend. There’s more to come.

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Warning, and a mystery instrument

It will probably take me several days to go through all my Winfield pictures and recordings. Until then, here’s a minor project for you: identify this object:

Kansas wildlife

Now that Death Valley days are over in Kansas, I figured that I could probably survive a trip to the botanical garden this afternoon. Here are a few of the pictures I snapped there.

Usually lizards hide before I can zoom in on them, but this one (a six-lined racerunner, I think) was too intent on his lunch to pay attention to me.

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What the hell —

I posted a couple of pictures just before I left the office today. When I checked this site an hour later, the post had reverted back to “draft” status, with most of the text missing. Later during the evening, the post reappeared, but now it’s gone again. I’m guessing that there are some problems with the server that hosts my site.

Here are the pictures, again. We’ll see if they are still here in the morning.

All the scaffolding that filled the Wichita cathedral for much of the year is gone now, and you can see the work of the painters. There are 280 rosettes in the church, each one freshly gilded.