Bicycle Planet

On this planet, unlike this planet, the inhabitants have made a clearing for cyclocross racing.

This was made in Photoshop from a whole bunch of shots at the Afton Alps Cyclocross race. Normal photos can be found on Flickr.

Shibuya Panorama Revisited

I just had to go back into this panorama. So much of what makes this corner so cool are all the huge video screens. I think there are 3-4. But the pano doesn't really show them. The overexposed one on the right, called Super Lisa, was kind of unavoidable but the monster one right in the middle, the Q-Front, is barely noticeable - and its 3 stories high! It was bad timing that there wasn't a feed when I snapped the 3 shots for the panorama.

But looking through all my photos of that evening I came across a shot with a decent exposure of both screens. So I just had to go back in. The Super Lisa monitor was simple. I cropped out the screen area on the original and scaled the image to fit. A little color correction and it was done. The Q-Front was a little more tricky because of the grid running through the image and the building. But actually the grid helped me register the 2 as I scaled down the image on a separate layer. Once in place I used a little math to do the combining. I set the image layer blend mode to Add which takes the pixel value of the top layer and adds it to the pixel value layer underneath. So white (256) + black(0) = 256 (white). So what happens is that all the black of the image at a value of 0 does not get added to the original wall color. No need to do a ton of erasing. Neat huh?
One last thing I had to do was to go into the added images and try to match the noise. It's a little weird to think about adding noise but if you looked really closely you would notice the videos being smoother then the surroundings. That can tell the brain that something funny is going on.

To me this now better captures my experience of Shibuya even thou it is not a photo of a real moment in time.

Shibuya Panorama

Another panorama from Tokyo. This time in the trendy area of Shibuya. This corner is the Time Square of Japan making it probably the second most over photographed spot next to Mt Fuji. But for good reason becuase it is so cool. Never the less it's one of my favorite places and deserving of a place in my blog. This was another set of photos that I had forgotten about and had never assembled until now.

Here is a google map of the area. The blue marker is where I was standing.


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Tokyo Panorama

I've been spending some time reviewing and cleaning out my digital photos. With Lightroom it's a pleasure not a chore. I discovered some shots from Tokyo that I never got around to assembling into a panorama. Worked out anyway because now I have good software to do it.

This shot was from the top of the Mori Building in Roppongi. A beautiful new tower. Just to the left of center is the Tokyo Tower. A well know Tokyo landmark that, yes, is a ripoff of the Eiffel Tower. In the distance is Tokyo bay. You can just make out the Raindow Bridge that crosses over to Odaiba.

As you can see it was a hazy day which always leads to dull low contrast photographs. Yet with Lightroom I was able to easily extract enough contrast to make a decent, thou not great, shot. To give you an idea of where I started, here is what the center shot looked like unprocessed.

Haleakala Panorama

Another panorama on top of the volcano. The last one I swear. Panoramas seem to always be horizontal so I decided to try a vertical along the valley bottom. When taking pano photos it's important to shot in fully manual mode so that the exposures will be the same across all photos. With this shot I had to balance between the bright sky and background with the dark foreground. That is another reason why shooting in RAW is great because I can play around with the exposures once I get back home instead of trying to get it right on the spot.

Haleakala Summit

After my epic climb up the mountain, I pulled out the camera equipment to record the strange and beautiful landscape. It's hard to believe I'm on the same island. It's more like being on the Moon.

On the extreme right edge in the far background you can begin to see the sloop of Moana Kea on the big island.

This panorama is facing north into Haleakala valley. According to the pamphlet the volcano crater has long since eroded away. What we now see is a valley dug into what used to be the top.

Pigeon Point Lighthouse

After looking at the elephant seals on Christmas Eve, I stopped at a nearby lighthouse. Since it was such a nice day I was hoping to get some great shots of the lighthouse. The Pigeon Point Lighthouse is no longer in use (probably due to satellites and GPS) and is in serious danger of falling down. Luck for us it looked sturdy enough. An interesting fact is that it is named after a ship and not the obvious assumption of the bird. I guess it is true of many light houses up and down the coast.

It was late afternoon when I shot this so the colors were really starting to pop. It was also neat that there was a observation deck built out on a rock on the ocean side. It offered a great spot to be able to shot back towards the builds and the coast with the sun behind me. I can't think of a better time and place to photograph this landmark. I felt luck to be there.

This is another panorama of 6 photos. The black area at the bottom is where I did not shoot photos. So the bottom curve could be considered the rotation path of the camera. The exposure of the sky across the whole pan was too difficult to match in the stitching software so I ended up masking out the sky and replacing it with a gradient based on colors in the original sky. It's very close to the original, just more even. Click on the image for the larger version.

Panoramas: Boston Sci. Campus

Here is another panorama shot. This time on the campus where I work. This building is our training center and is one of the newest additions to the company.

There are 7 photographs shot in portrait orientation. They were assembled in Realviz Stitcher, cleaned up in Photoshop, then color corrected in Lightroom. I could have done the adjustments in Photoshop but I wanted to test out the connection between Photoshop and Lightroom for created images verses straight out of the camera photos. Plus I'm getting to like adjusting in Lightroom rather then Photoshop.

The second pano has a Lightroom black and white effect applied. I thought it was cool.

Click on the images to get a gainormous size version.

Montalcino Panorama

Here is another panorama from Italy. This time from the top of the castle in Montalcino Italy.

Italia: The Vatican

90 of the 455 photos I took in Italy are now up on Flickr. This one is another panorama I made from 8 photographs. The original is huge!

This view is of St Peter's Square and I am standing in front of St Peter's Basilica. The wikipedia entry has a panorama looking the other way. Funny.

We spend most of our last day at the Vatican touring through the museum. And by museum they mean through the halls of the Vatican itself. The place is gigantic and each corner reveals more art, sculptures and frescos. We stood in line for 1.5 hours in enter then probably another hour snaking through the halls to the crown gem of the Vatican - Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. I was in awe of it. The room was packed with people looking straight up. I managed to take a couple photos before the guards started yelling "No Photo". I saw the signs but thought it was no flash but they weren't allowing any photography or even video. Not sure why. So I feel a little bad but never the less got to take home a memory. The room is much darker then the photos give the impression of. I lighted them quite a bit.

Italia Trip

Linda and I returned from Italy a week ago and I still haven't gotten any photos onto the web or blogged about it. I have 400+ photos. It's a real problem deciding which ones not to post. But to start with here is a panorama I took of the Tuscan town of Montepulciano. It's composed of 5 photos. (Don't forget to click on the photo for a large version)

Montepulciano might be my favorite spot we visited. Typical of most towns in Tuscany it occupied the top of a tall hill (or small mountain depending on your view). We parked near the left side of the photo and ended up walking all the way through town to the right side. Fun little shops lined the narrow main street. Linda bought a couple purses and I found a neat leather bound sketchbook that are supposedly used as props in the Harry Potter movies. It looks very medieval and sure to contain magic!

At the end the day we stopped at a cafe to have a glass of wine. We ended up staying for dinner as well. I was so busy sketching in my new sketchbook that I forgot to look at the menu. Our very friendly waiter said that he would take care of me. I was game. What I got was a pork shank that was the best thing I eat all week. Now, I rarely meet a pig I won't eat but this pig knee was truly amazing - tender and meaty. It was the only thing I ate!