Sunrise in Black and White

Taken last week in the woods around Groot Heidestein.

Moerputten and Heusden

Last weekend we had our yearly spring trip with the camera club. Somehow the word' spring' didn't come in mind on that day. When I left home, the sun tried to break through, so with luck, it could be a nice day for photography..... Luck was nowhere to be found. The whole day, nothing but drizzle, wind, rain, drizzle, and rain (at least in the vicinity of ' s Hertogenbosch.)

I went a bit early, and when I arrived, I was the only person there, so I was able to shoot some photos without having to worry about other people showing up in my photos.

The Moerputten is an old trainbridge that runs through a patch of protected nature. It's basically just a bridge now. No trains run over it.

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Getting Around a Wide-Angle Lens

Going on holiday is fun, but it's also a time of concessions on several levels. Especially if you can't bring every lens you own or (in theory) might need. Since the awesome Nikon 5-500mm f/1.8G VR ED N (small, <€1000, <1kg) isn't widely available. This means deciding what to bring in your camera bag.

In my case, I wanted to experiment with primes during my holiday. this also means that you have to use the foot-zoom, and on several occasions that won't work because of certain limitation (walls, buildings, ravines, etc.). In those cases you have 3 options;

1. Don't make the photo
2. Make a photo, but know immediately that it will end in /dev/null when you get home (a just-for-the-record photo).
3. Improvise

So as you might have guessed, I ran into such a situation in Toledo, Spain. They have this great cathedral in the middle of an old town with narrow streets. You need a ultra-wide angle lens for almost anything there.

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Creating Panoramas for the Web

I intend to create several panoramas during my next holiday, so I'm investigating the possibilities for presenting them on my website. Several pieces of software are under investigation, and so far Zoomify is the only one which is relatively simple to operate.

AutopanoGiga is probably the buggiest software I've used (it crashed almost every other panorama), but creates the best panoramas in my opinion. Better than PTGui, but that one is 100% stable. Somehow you can't have everything :-)

The other pieces of software for creating interactive flash/QuickTime movies from panoramas are:

• AutoPanoPro / Giga with the AutopanoTour as the flash export module
• Pano2VR

Results (read: experiments) can be found on my Panoramas page in the Photography section of this website.

Note that the Zoomify versions are stored on a sub-domain outside of the SquareSpace domain. Since the sub-domain hasn't the best of up-time, you might be looking at a relatively blank page. The reason for this is a silly limit on uploading ZIP files to the SquareSpace backend. These ZIP files may contain up to 100 files. The entire Zoomify environment contains over 6500 files, and I don't feel like uploading these by hand....

If all goes well, the Pano2VR panoramas will be stored on the SquareSpace backend, and therefore be better accessible.

Pudong Shanghai Skyline Panorama

I 'found' a couple of 'weird' photo's in my Lightroom collection. It seemed that they were supposed to become a panorama, but I somehow forgot to create it.....

It has been a while since my holiday to China and Tibet, but it's better late than never :-).

More panorama's on my flickr page

Winter in the Spring

More panorama's on my flickr page

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