Tower of Power

As spherical panoramas go this one is really bad.  I was at a park without  even a tripod and decided that trying to shoot a "little planet" spherical panorama would be interesting from inside the HV electrical tower.  As you can see the stitching is terrible (and I spent way too much time in Photoshop even getting this far) but I really like the view.

As you can see the towers go off in the distance forward (at the bottom, across the lake) and behind (top of image) me.  The next time I see one of these that I can easily get to I am going to take my panorama head!

Chirp no more.....

I like crickets, but not when they make too much noise.  This guy (gal?) will no longer bother me in the basement.

If you click on the image you should see it full-screen.  If you look closely you can see that he has two protuberances toward the rear of his body (shown below).  I hesitate to ask what they are used for....

Nighttime Panorama

I took this last summer on a rainy evening outside the funeral home that the Creative Focus Group (Bloomington Photography Club) meets in.  The photo is a 9 shot high dynamic range (3 shots for each of the three images) panorama.  You can tell that the wind was blowing by looking at the flag which shows a ghost.

Click on image to enlarge.

Kipp generator lamp

Not spectacular, but I like this photo.  I found an old Kipp gas generator years ago and with a bit of help from the glass blower (drilling a hole in the base) I converted it to a lamp which we keep in our bedroom.  One night the door was ajar and the light happened to strike the lamp at an angle that I thought looked rather neat.  I set up my camera and took a time exposure to get this shot.

Coming at you!

Learning how to get 3D images to "jump" out of the screen is fun.  Here is a shot I took of the railroad tracks behind my house.  As a normal stereo image it is OK, but having the tracks come out of the frame makes it much better!

If you click on the image you can get it full-screen.

Th "mini" weeds of spring (up close)

It isn't March yet, but some of my favorite weeds are already starting to blossom.  I love looking at the very mall flowers of the early ground flowers (weeds?).  This guy (bittercress) seems to grow everywhere and is very prolific.  You can see the flowers and the maturing seed pods on the central stem.  Although they start out very small, they can grow to be 4 - 6 inches wide for the whole plant.

The clay dish is 3 inches in diameter.  The flower stem is shown below in side-by-side stereo

and as an anaglyph.

A very old bug

I did this just to see if I could.  While at the local Rock and Mineral Show last year I foolishly spent $10 on a piece of amber that looked like it had all kinds of bugs inside.  I finally got around to cutting and polishing a piece and, sure enough, there is a 40,000,000 (more or less) year old mosquito (or some such creature!).  This again is a red/green anaglyph.

From the tip of the tail to the end of the head is about 2.5 mm.

It isn't always what it seems....

I have spent a fair amount of time recently working on my equipment, and I decided that a piece of "rough" limestone was an excellent sample to look at.  Since the BPC had a "share" for "what is it" photos I took the following (shown as a 3D anaglyph).  The width in the top photo is about 1/2 inch.

My dear wife took one look and suggested this as a better "what is it"--I have to agree that she has a good eye!

The limestone is on the right, mixed breakfast cereal on the left.

Escaping Spiders!

Watch out for spiders crawling out of their picture frames!  (you need red/green glasses for this one)

Messing with nature

This is a post I actually wrote last winter, but never got around to publishing.  I am still working on getting some quality snowflake photographs using my latest setup.  It is amazing how ugly most snows are, and this winter there has been almost no snows worth looking at!  Since I didn't have any new snowflake images, I dug out some of my older ones and fired up my Photoshop.  I created the following two snowflakes which were a definite improvement over the original:

Just because nature wants snowflakes to have hexagonal symmetry doesn't mean I have to agree.  And if I can have a five spoked snowflake, why not a seven legged starfish!

For details on how (not why!) this was done in Photoshop, check out my "Just Stuff" link.

Time flies when you don't post!

I had two people contact me concerning pics on my (terribly neglected) blog, so I decided I should at least try to put up a few new photos.  Shown here is how to get an afternoon of entertainment for $2.99 (plus tax).  I was taking a walk and stopped in the local Goodwill store.  The Sony digital camera actually had images on the memory card (someone had a nice vacation in Mexico!).  My guess is that they lost the charger or the battery died so they just tossed it.  In any case it took about 3 hours to carefully disassemble.

And no, I don't intend to put it back together!