These panoramas are the result of 8 days of "panographing" the city of Istanbul, as a guest of Atilla Aksoy from Works, the turkish advertising agency.
This material will be used to promote Istanbul as "European Capital of Culture in 2010".
Thanks to Pete for emailing Vincent LaForet's very nice scene, not that I'm a Yankee fan.
It's too early for civilians. As dawn's first light falls on the jagged peaks, creeps down the dwindling glaciers and glides across glass-faced Swiftcurrent Lake, most of the tourists in the Many Glacier Hotel are still snoozing.Related: Yellowstone Sunrise VR Scene and Waterton Lakes National ParkBut down at water's edge, three early risers huddle around a camera. One of the guys, leaning on a tripod and waiting for the clouds to arrange themselves over the jagged peaks, has a Beatles haircut, the build of a shortstop and a face you've seen before somewhere.
Perhaps during pledge week.
"I want more of the color," he says, peering through a viewfinder. "OK, I'm doing it." And the film rolls.
Yes, it's Ken Burns, solemn PBS documentarian of the Civil War, jazz, baseball, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mark Twain, Congress, the Brooklyn Bridge, and more than a few other American characters and institutions. Beside him stand cinematographer Buddy Squires and writer Dayton Duncan. Upstairs in the hotel, Burns' wife and 3-year-old are sleeping.
45.880822 -123.962131
Clusty Search: Cannon Beach, OR
Driving the speed limit early this morning, a dark blue car with flags zoomed past. A blur on my left. The nearby stop light provided an opportunity to take this photo.
Obama 12? Does it imply there are numbers 1 to 11 driving around? Or, is it a play on Adam 12? One needs to be of a certain age to recall the TV series Adam 12.
Finally, the car is a new Chevy Malibu. It's interesting that there is no mention of Joe Biden on the flags, stickers or plate, which is perhaps, for the best.
About ten hours after the end of last night's closing ceremony, I headed to the Olympic Green, completely unsure of what I'd find when I got there. I hadn't heard much about when the Green will open to the ticketless public, or if it would stay open until the Paralympics -- so I knew it would either be packed to the brim, or completely deserted. I arrived to find the latter.When I approached the Olympic subway line, the streets packed with tourists and scalpers just yesterday were now empty, and only one of dozens of security checkpoints to access the subway was open -- and there wasn't even anyone in line. Unsure if my accreditation card would still be valid, I approached the checkpoint to find a guard waving me through. Two of the guards were even taking a nap -- it was obvious that I was their first customer for quite some time.
A beautiful vr scene from the diving platform in Beijing, host of the 2008 Olympic Games.
Full Screen VR Scene.
Map 27.247581 -82.536145. Clusty Search: Siesta Key. A beautiful beach.
This is one of those moments when a camera in hand meets a scene waiting to be photographed: a beleaguered traveller resorting to solitaire on his PC while waiting for the promised next flight. The blue sky ignores the chaos below. Air travel is certainly, as a fellow passenger lamented, "not what it once was".
Website, Location. George Eastman via Britannica and Clusty.
26.149775 -81.348610. Clusty search: Alligator Alley.
A rather spectacular setting, representing the classic road not taken. Links:
The journey to the glacier is an adventure, particularly the "Ice Explorer" ride.
Full screen vr scene.
Links:
While capturing this sunrise scene at Old Faithful recently, I learned that the BBC is shooting a 3 part series on Yellowstone. Their videographers, equipped with some very nice equipment, spent the past two mornings waiting for the "perfect" sunrise behind Old Faithful. This scene, on their third day, was best, according to their National Park Service Ranger minder. The program will evidently air in the UK this fall and here sometime in 2009.
Location: 44.460174 -110.829563
The kind ranger also mentioned that she is often asked "where they put the animals at night?"
I have no idea what these "mimes" were publicizing at the corner of Oakland Avenue and Monroe on a Sunday evening.
Walking around Chicago this weekend, I observed no shortage of White Sox and Cubs paraphernalia (the two teams played one another at Wrigley Field). This couple certainly expressed the spirit of the weekend.
The Washington Post has published several VR scenes from Central China.
A few powerful spring storms passed through Madison today. I caught this photo later in the afternoon.
Bata Shoe Museum website:
Sonja Bata was born in Switzerland, where she studied architecture. In 1946 she married Thomas J. Bata, the son of a well-known Czechoslovakian shoe manufacturer who had emigrated to Canada at the beginning of World War II. His family enterprise in Czechoslovakia had been nationalized under the Communist occupation. From the beginning, Sonja Bata shared her husbandfs determination to rebuild the organization and took an active interest in what was to become a global footwear business.This hand held vr scene was taken a few months ago while "stuck" in Toronto during a snowstorm.Over the years, she grew increasingly fascinated by shoes, their history and the reasons why specific shapes and decorative treatments had developed in different cultures. During her travels, she realized that some traditional forms were being replaced with western shoes, reflecting changing lifestyles to some extent influenced by the production of the spreading Bata factories serving local markets.
Since the 1940s, Sonja Bata has scoured the world for footwear of every description, from the most ordinary to the most extraordinary. Her combined interest in design and shoes has led to a very personal collection, with examples from many cultures and historic periods.
Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died in New Brunswick, N.J., on Sunday. He was 65 and lived in Woodbridge, N.J.Check the impressive video out here.The cause was pancreatic cancer, which had spread, said his friend Sydney H. Schanberg.
Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians — a third of the population — were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation.
He had been a journalistic partner of Mr. Schanberg, a Times correspondent assigned to Southeast Asia. He translated, took notes and pictures, and helped Mr. Schanberg maneuver in a fast-changing milieu. With the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, Mr. Schanberg was forced from the country, and Mr. Dith became a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian Communists.
Click for a full screen VR view.
There are some flaws in this hand held scene, but it's a pleasant view of a spectacular space, particularly the day before our latest snowstorm.
Robert Serra offers up some beautiful and unique vr scenes, including a dishwasher interior shot.
The Washington Post has posted some great scenes from tomorrow's primary states.
The vistas here in this land of desert and rock feature deep canyons and striated rock formations. But the most impressive sight is yet to come. At some point next month, the gray floor of the desert will be set ablaze by carpets of wildflowers, in riotous shades of purple, yellow and red.Aficionados maintain that witnessing desert wildflowers is one of the most rewarding experiences in nature. Fall's dramatic leaf color change is guaranteed to happen every year. Desert wildflowers are far less predictable. If good spring rains are lacking, which was largely the case in 2006 and 2007, the flowers don't appear. When nature does cooperate, for two weeks or a month the desert looks as if it has been streaked by a giant paintbrush.
This year is shaping up as one of those lucky years, due to a series of storms that swept California and the Southwest in January, followed by more rain in February. "I'm hoping it's going to be terrific," says Patrick Leary, a professor of plant biology at the College of Southern Nevada, who teaches a course in desert plants. "You suffer and wait and pray for a good year and when that year comes, you have to be out there every available moment. And then it's gone."
Not the best shot, but the sky presented a glorious view of God's handiwork.
A few photos from a late arriving visitor to the University of Wisconsin's Kohl Center.
While I did not arrive early enough to catch the speech inside the Kohl Center, I always find it interesting to note the political opportunism during these events. Governor Doyle, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and local Mayor Dave Cieslewicz all rated a nod from Obama. John Kerry's 2004 appearance with Bruce Springsteen included a number of local politicians, including Elizabeth Burmaster, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Superintendent (a nonpartisan position).
Finally, a few Ron Paul supporters promoted their candidate in front of the proceedings.
After pondering summer with a few photos, we're back to reality blowing snow this morning. I think this photo captures our existence rather well, at the moment. Note the snow depth next to my snowblower's intake. 13.3" according to Channel3000.
The streets I drove were in good shape early today.
This image of a woman jumping from a rocky cliff into the Mediterranean was taken from a "people's beach" adjacent to the Hotel du Cap [Clusty search]. A useful image as we Madisonians face another snow shoveling event. Clusty search: Antibes.
Thoughts of summer as Winter continues in Madison. Note the fashionable sushi delivery vehicle, a Smart Car and the smartly dressed pedestrian. Summer in Provence. Much more on Aix-en-Provence here [map]
These portraits were made in a portable studio that was hauled from fair to fair in California and Arizona between 1976 and 1980. The studio was complete with darkroom and a shooting stage and it took a crew of three to run it: a shooter (me), a front person to handle customers and a darkroom person to develop and print the 4x5 inch negative. The entire process, when going smoothly, took about fifteen minutes.
An impressive waterfall, particularly in Winter with ice climbers scaling the heights. Clusty search.
The Montmorency Falls, cascading 83 metres down to the river below (30 metres more than Niagara Falls), are situated on a historical site of natural beauty in the Montmorency Falls Park. A cable car runs up to the Manoir Montmorency, where a restaurant, reception rooms and boutiques await the visitor.Satellite View.
Hans Nyberg has compiled a great set of New Year's Eve 2008 Panoramas, including one I shot in Quebec City. Thanks much to Hans for a great site and for rendering my scene.
Quebec City celebrated the beginning of their 400th anniversary celebrations that evening. Learn more, here. 2008 is the 400th anniversary of Champlain's landing in Quebec.
As digital cameras proliferate, consumers want to make use of all of those pictures they're taking. Many of them wind up buried on computer hard drives. But it's getting easier to take those photos and display them on a digital photo frame in the living room.These photo frames look just like any other picture frame from a distance. But they are, in fact, small liquid crystal displays that can change the photos on display every few seconds. For romantics and technology Luddites, that is a kind of blasphemy, a reflection of a fickle age where not even a still image can remain constant.
But who says you have to look at the same pictures of your relatives on the mantel for all eternity? Sometimes, change is good. That's why digital photo frames were the No. 2 consumer technology gift on Black Friday, just behind navigation devices, according to market researcher NPD Group. Sales were up 171 percent compared with a year ago.
Picking a good digital photo frame is a matter of looking at the display and checking out its quality. If it looks good, that's a clue.
A cold view (wind chill was below 0) from Olin Park early Saturday morning. Madison's Monona Terrace and the State Capitol are visible.
The journey to this morning's Winter Farmer's Market was beautiful, but quite cold. Madison's Frank Lloyd Wright inspired Monona Terrace never fails to provide an interesting vantage point for the photographer.
Editorial Director Marco Trezzini, via email:
Since I believe we have created the best issue of VRMAG ever, I'm writing you with the hope you will accept to dedicate 5 minutes of your time to explore our online magazine dedicated to photographic virtual reality exploration of people, places and events around the world. Almost forgot to mention, VRMAG is a no profit publication, with no ads.Visit www.vrmag.org now.This issue features the closed zone of Chernobyl, Wired NextFest in Los Angeles, Cuba's capital city La Habana, Red square in Moscow, the Palaces where European Royalties lives, New York's Tribute in light, the island of Cyprus's Aphrodite beach, Valentino's exhibit Ara Pacis museum in Rome, the Mayan ruins Chinkultic and Tenam Puente in Mexico, Vienna, the Copenhagen Opera House, Seattle, RedBull AirRace Abu Dhabi ....
For VRMAG showing panoramas of the physical world is not enough,
so we'll take you to Second Life in order to visit Anshe Chung's Picture Gallery Dresden, and to DanCoyote's Full Immersion Hyperformalism and get behind the scenes on the creation of next generation interactive screenshots for the gaming industry, take a visit to an "wellenkreis" an art installation of an endless sine curve in real space ...You will experience the view a sleeping pill has from it's medicine bottle,
watch the world as a coca cola would do, transport you into a washing machine and feel like your sock. Be a fish and be intrigued by a guy ironing underwater,
enter the head of Hermann's sculpture, chat with Jonathan livingston, experience a bubble party, feel the thrill of extreme canyoning, and much more ...
Leslie Feist rocked Madison Friday evening, 16 November 2007. Despite her severe ankle sprain (evidently while running in Omaha, NE the prior day), Feist and her band entertained the sold out Orpheum Theatre with ouststanding vocals, delightful instruments and an elegant video art show. Check out the playlist here.
More, please.
Watch an MPEG-4 Video Slideshow:
Rob Thomas attended the concert and wrote this.
Details of the Badgers 4-0 win available here. North Dakota had an amazing 43 shots on goal, including 25 in the third period. A tremendous, fast paced game. One of the best I've seen.
Wisconsin State Capitol and Fall Colors.
Maureen Taylor has dated a photograph to 1913 by studying the size and shape of a Lion touring car's headlamps. Armed with her collection of 19th-century fashion magazines, she can pinpoint the brief period when Victorian women wore their bangs in tight curls rather than swept back. Using a technique borrowed from the CIA, she identified a photo of Jesse James by examining the shape of his right ear.With millions of Americans obsessively tracing their roots, Ms. Taylor has emerged as the nation's foremost historical photo detective. During a recent meeting of the Maine Genealogical Society, attendees lined up a dozen deep as she handled their images with a cotton glove and peered at the details through a photographer's loupe. One man offered a portrait photo and asked if it could be of his great grandmother, who died in 1890. "It's not," Ms. Taylor said after about 15 seconds; she'd dated the hairstyle and billowy blouse to the early 20th century. When another attendee asked why her great-great-grandfather was wearing small hoops in his ears in a portrait, Ms. Taylor explained, "He was in the maritime trade."
Buena Vista Park, Alma, WI. Map
Since 1974, Nikon has sponsored a yearly photo competition for images that delve into the worlds beyond the reach of the unaided human eye. The camera maker feted the photographers who made the top 20 "photomicrographs" in Nikon's annual Small World competition at New York's Explorer's Club. The winners were drawn from a pool of 1,709 submissions.The dozen images collected here (the top 10 images, plus two Wired News picks) capture facets of living organisms that have a technical meaning to the trained specialist, but appear to be pure art to the layperson. The striking images convey something both strange and alien that could almost be sold as the first glimpses of extraterrestrial life. Yet, many of the objects presented here could not be more mundane or down-to-earth: A piece of ivory, a typical aquarium fish, a drop of sea water.
Fifty miles north of Frankfurt lies the small German town of Solms. Turn off the main thoroughfare and you find yourself driving down tranquil suburban streets, with detached houses set back from the road, and, on a warm morning in late August, not a soul in sight. Nobody does bourgeois solidity like the Germans: you can imagine coming here for coffee and cakes with your aunt, but that would be the limit of excitement. By the time you reach Oskar-Barnack-Strasse, the town has almost petered out; just before the railway line, however, there is a clutch of industrial buildings, with a red dot on the sign outside. As far as fanfare is concerned, that’s about it. But here is the place to go, if you want to find the most beautiful mechanical objects in the world.
One of my favorite recent photos, taken in the 5th - Paris.
Today would have been the 99th birthday of Henri Cartier-Bresson, a co-founder of the Magnum Photos cooperative agency and one of the foremost photographers of our time. Magnum and Slate present some of his most memorable work, alongside portraits of the master photographer himself. Click here to read his biography on the Magnum site.
A few observations after my first Packer game in 24 years:
Berlin Airlift Memorial at Tempelhof Airport U-Bahn Platz der Luftbrucke 52.484141 13.387412
Niall Ferguson:
t was “the most generous act of any people, anytime, anywhere, to another people,” its chief administrator declared. It was “among the most noble experiences in human affairs,” its representative in Europe said. It was “the most staggering and portentous experiment in the entire history of our foreign policy,” the young Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who served on its staff, wrote. Foreigners concurred. It was “like a lifeline to sinking men,” according to the British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. It “saved us from catastrophe,” a manager at Europe’s largest tire factory declared. Sixty years after Secretary of State George C. Marshall outlined the need for economic aid to stimulate European recovery, in a speech at Harvard University’s commencement on June 5, 1947, the plan named after him continues to be fondly remembered in donor and recipient countries alike. In our own time, liberal internationalists have periodically called for new Marshall Plans. After the collapse of Communism, some economists maintained that the former Soviet Union was in need of one. More recently, there has been desultory talk of Marshall Plans for Afghanistan, Iraq, and even the West Bank and Gaza. When critics lament the allegedly modest sums currently spent by the American government on foreign aid, they often draw an unfavorable contrast with the late nineteen-forties. Yet some people, at the time of its inception and since, have questioned both the Marshall Plan’s motivation and its efficacy. Was it really so altruistic? And did it really avert a calamity
Trotting around Madison's West Side earlier today.
This is an interesting image, taken from a slow boat on the Thu Bon River, just south of Hoi An, during a recent trip to Vietnam.
Australians, Americans? What might be on their minds - the War, friends, travel? Their faces seem to imply many, many words. A few more notes and links on Vietnam can be found here.
Keith Martin posted some beautiful VR scenes from Turkey.
Classic barge: The Oldsmobile 98 Convertible.
A few extraordinary photos from a drive across the 'stans.
The UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections has selected and digitized 5,746 of the more than three million images contained in the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Daily News photographic archives. The photographs chronicle the history and growth of Los Angeles from the 1920s to 1990.
This collection of digitized images is made available online by the UCLA Digital Library to assist a wide variety of researchers, including scholars, educators, students, writers, filmmakers, urban planners, community activists, librarians, and members of the general public.
Mark Brautigam (b. 1972) is a photographer living in Milwaukee, WI. He attended the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Minnesota and served as an officer in the United States Marine Corps for four years.
On October 24, 1946, not long after the end of World War II and years before the Sputnik satellite opened the space age, a group of soldiers and scientists in the New Mexico desert saw something new and wonderful—the first pictures of Earth as seen from space.The grainy, black-and-white photos were taken from an altitude of 65 miles by a 35-millimeter motion picture camera riding on a V-2 missile launched from the White Sands Missile Range. Snapping a new frame every second and a half, the rocket-borne camera climbed straight up, then fell back to Earth minutes later, slamming into the ground at 500 feet per second. The camera itself was smashed, but the film, protected in a steel cassette, was unharmed.
Fred Rulli was a 19-year-old enlisted man assigned to the recovery team that drove into the desert to retrieve film from those early V-2 shots. When the scientists found the cassette in good shape, he recalls, "They were ecstatic, they were jumping up and down like kids." Later, back at the launch site, "when they first projected [the photos] onto the screen, the scientists just went nuts."
Virtual Properties.1999
2006
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| Gathering Storm, San Carlos, CA Airport: Thursday, 2/22/2007Click for larger photos | |
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| Above and below the clouds: Iowa and Madison: 2/23/2007 | |
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No, this isn't an upside-down rainbow, and the photographer hasn't faked the picture. It's an unusual phenomenon caused by sunlight shining through a thin, invisible screen of tiny ice crystals high in the sky and has nothing at all to do with the rain.
Andrew G. Saffas, a Concord artist and photographer, saw the colorful arc at 3:51 p.m. on a beautiful day recently when a slight rain had fallen in the morning. He thought it was a rainbow, created by raindrops refracting sunlight the way glass prisms refract any bright beam of light.
Instead, what Saffas saw was what scientists call a circumzenithal arc, according to physicist Joe Jordan, a former NASA space scientist at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, who is now director of the Sky Power Institute in Santa Cruz, which promotes solar power and other alternative fuels.
In January of 2007, I travelled to Antarctica (specifically, the tip of the Antarctica Peninsula and environs) with my wife and stepfather.
This page is intended to offer a few stills, some movies and a thought or two on the experience. Nothing heavy, I assure you.
It is not my habit to promote my latest vacation. Antarctica is so extraordinary, and the tools for recording memories are (nowadays) so capable that I decided to "give it a go".
The NYT has posted its Year in Pictures, featuring images of war, politics, sports, and more. It's amazing how quickly events can fade from our (or at least my) consciousness, often just months after they occur.
MSNBC has some terrific galleries from this past year. (Bet you've never seen a bull doing a headstand before.) See also Time's collection.
Purported pyramids, giant jellyfish, and a number of pythons that swallowed more than they bargained for were among the stars of this year's most popular news photos.
These two beautiful arches are located near the Blue Caves at the north end of the Greek island of Zakynthos. Unfortunately the boat trip from the city of Zakynthos to the Blue Caves no longer visits these arches. Photo by Dimitris Raptis, who has a very nice web page about the island of Zakynthos.
A pair of humpback whales spent a half hour doing pirouettes last week within 50 yards of a fishing boat as photographers and a video crew recorded the scene.
"That was cool," Ariel Miller, 11, the youngest passenger aboard the Salty Lady, said when the show was over.
It had been a rather frustrating day at the Farallones, not much going on besides the usual riffraff of western gulls and sea lions. A few speedy Dall's porpoises finally came along, bow-riding in the late afternoon, just when skipper Roger Thomas turned his boat back toward Sausalito.
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A view from the Overture Center.
Sort of a quintessential Madison scene: A Volve, The Orpheum, Capitol, Bus Shelter and a chain restaurant.
Meanwhile, in Tibet.....
Dutch artist/engineer Theo Jansen makes unbelievable kinetic sculptures; it's as if da Vinci had access to PVC. This video (a BMW ad, as it happens) shows off some of his walking machines in motion on the beach. Wired covers the genesis and evolution of Jansen's work, and you can see his two-ton Animaris Rhinoceros Transport on the move in this video. Many more photos are on his site. [Via] [For more on kinetic scuplture, see previous entry.]
For the 12th year, the Woodward Dream Cruise rumbles and squeals its way up Woodward Ave.More here.
Featuring thousands of classic cars and hot rods. The Dream Cruise is a auto enthusiast dream, and a celebration of Michigan's long and important automotive history.
One of the more interesting suburban intersections: Fitchburg's Seminole Road and Highway PD.
Someone lost a box of pizza - breakfast fodder for the birds.
New Mexico
Colorado
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The new Central Library features 25 community meeting and study rooms, a state-of-the-art auditorium, an updated children's library, a center for new Americans, a space especially for teens, and 353,000 square feet of additional access to knowledge-enhancing resources.Well worth checking out as Madison considers a new downtown library (please keep Kenton Peter's metallic designs away...)
With one-of-a-kind architecture, design and resources, the new Central Library is a destination spot for residents, the downtown workforce and visitors interested in experiencing the library's extensive collection; attending special events, performances and author readings; or simply relaxing with a cup of coffee in a warm, welcoming place.
and a perfect location on the Memorial Union Terrace.
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Late afternoon light.
Posted by jez at 
1940's?
Full Screen VR
