Trivia that matter
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:
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.
St. Mary Cathedral, Wichita, Kansas in USA
While the rest of the inmates at the office were enduring the annual Christmas luncheon, I visited the cathedral again with my camera. I set the tripod up in the choir loft this time, and used a tripod head designed specifically for panoramas. The “Panosaurus” made a difference in the image quality. There are far fewer glitches than in my previous attempt, and they’re not as obvious.
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.
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.
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.
This is what the interior of St. Mary Cathedral in Wichita looked like last summer.
Here’s what it looks like now:
St. Mary Cathedral in Wichita is about to undergo over a year of renovations. When I have time, I haul my tripod and camera there to record it as it is now. Here are some recent pictures. There are more in my gallery here.
Another panorama, this time from near the altar. If you look carefully, you’ll see an instance of bilocation.
