Good grief. It’s not even February yet.
Category: Photo gallery
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.)
The view from the front porch
This sunset took me by surprise, and there was no time to run to a more scenic area to grab the shots.
A higher viewpoint
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.
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°
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.
The last Winfield post …
… maybe.
This is a slide show of the pictures I took at the Walnut Valley Festival. You might notice a lot of photos of Roger and Tricia. That’s partly because you were likely to hear good music when they were around. They are whom you hear in the video.
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.
There are more pictures of carp people below the fold.
Winfield 2012
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.
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.
Kansas weather
This is what the sky looked like just before I left work.
It’s been a rather chilly day today, only reaching 99°F, instead of the predicted 108°. It’s even cooler now — not that I’m complaining.
Obstacle course
I get around town primarily by bicycle. Since the city planners have made it nearly impossible to travel any distance greater than a half-mile in Wichita without using arterial roads, I often ride on sidewalks. This can present difficulties. Here’s what I encounter when I go the the grocery story:
Badly-placed banners.
Today’s puzzler
A pleasanter photographic subject
I don’t really want that spider to be the first thing a visitor here sees, so here’s something else I saw this morning.
Quieter than a mouse …
… but I’d rather deal with mice.
Not drowning, just waving
Blogging is low priority right now. I’ll be back eventually. Until then, here are a few links.
Mouretsu Pirates is the only current show I’m following. (I’ll eventually watch Sakamichi no Apollon, and I might finish Tsuritama, but it will be a while before I get to either. The soundtrack for the former is worth tracking down.) One advantage space pirates have over their earthbound predecessors: the cuisine is better.
Everyone who ever writes a review needs to pay attention to Steven Greydanus’s thoughts on spoilers. Once Kirika and Mireille are done with the perpetrators of comment spam, I’ll ask them to pay a visit to the bloggers who announced a certain event in the eleventh episode of Katanagatari, sometimes in the titles of their posts as they appeared at Anime Nano.
Eve Tushnet writes about three of my favorite writers: Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes is my favorite of his books, too); John Bellairs (who wrote about shufflies); and, Diana Wynne Jones. (Memo to web designers: Black type on a white background is easy to read. Light grey type on a white background isn’t.)
I don’t do politics here beyond the occasional sarcastic aside. Ace touches on one reason why. Elizabeth Scalia writes about another, related reason.
Winter wear for the physicists among you: emission spectra scarves. (Via Fillyjonk.)
John C. Wright, proponent of Space Princess Science Fiction, reprints his research on the Catwoman Equation.
Although Yellowstone is a superdupervolcano, it doesn’t really pose an immediate, immense threat. There might be enough oomph left for one more VEI8 eruption, but there will be plenty of warning and probably thousands of years before that happens. If you own land in Wyoming, you don’t need to be in a hurry to unload it. The vicinity of Mt. Ranier is far more dangerous. It wouldn’t take a large eruption to generate lahars that would reach Puget Sound. However, the most nightmarish city to live, from a vulcanologist’s point of view, is Naples in Italy. Vesuvius is its best-known neighbor, but it’s only one of three. Update: Let’s not forget Auckland, built on a volcanic field and liable to experience a Parícutin-type episode at any time.
Here are the true lyrics to “O Fortuna.”
(Via Darwin Catholic.)
I’m generally in favor of girls with guns, but this batch could use a few lessons in gun-handling.
The Brickmuppet hasn’t scheduled a trip to Tokyo, has he?
Today’s picture
A snapshot from today’s “Ballet in the Park” production of Peter and the Wolf.