Random balcony panorama

I made this one on January 7, but don't think I ever got around to posting it. That's a storm rolling in from the southwest, but we only got around a quarter inch of rain that day.

Of snow and driving

Here is this morning's balcony panorama at sunrise.

I learned an important lesson: don't mess with the default focal length and focal length multiplier settings in Hugin Panorama Creator unless you know what the hell you're doing, or you'll get something like this:
Yeah.

Speaking of not knowing what the hell you're doing, if you live in Atlanta, and don't know how to drive in snow and/or ice, STAY THE HELL HOME. Really. Read a book, nap, play cards, clean the house, drink yourself into a coma, whatever. BUT STAY HOME.



From Sunday, January 9, 2011, the first day of our current Snowpocalypse 2011 episode, this is a quick video of one of a dozen or so cars driving the wrong way in I-85, between Shallowford and Clairmont in Atlanta. Yep: just turned around and drove the wrong way, apparently to a place where they could illegally cut over to the frontage road. Literally hundreds of cars were abandoned on the freeway, many on the sides, but a number just parked in traffic lanes. Many were turned off, dark inside, no lights, no occupants.

Where do those people go?

Full-sized tractor-trailers jackknifed, and sliding off the road. I thought you all were supposed to be professional drivers? (Hot Tip: meth doesn't keep you from sliding if you don't know how to drive on snow.)

Really, people: you knew this storm was coming for days. Nowhere you had to go in your rear wheel drive sedan or truck was that important. And if you do happen to drive an SUV with alltime AWD, but still don't know how to drive in snow or ice, refer to the paragraph above, and STAY HOME.

In my SUV, with true 4WD, the 20 miles from Lawrenceville to midtown Atlanta took an hour and a half, and would have taken much longer if I was driving like most of the chuckleheads on the freeway. At no point did I feel out of control, or slide, or skid. I spent most of the time avoiding other drivers, though certain stretches of 85 were delightfully (and a little creepily) empty:



At the risk of sounding like the bozo that NPR always manages to interview to respond to a snowstorm in the south by saying something like "Well, uh-huh, in North Dakota, we call that summer", this was NOT bad winter weather for driving. For much of the northern part of the country, it was a very average, even light, snowfall. The problem wasn't the snow, it was the drivers.

Oh, yeah, and: Confidential to Atlanta metro area drivers: don't drive with your emergency flashers on UNLESS YOU ACTUALLY HAVE AN EMERGENCY. Not knowing how to drive in snow is NOT an EMERGENCY. Driving slow is NOT AN EMERGENCY. We SEE you fine: you're driving a big dumb car or big dumb truck, and the visibility is approximately a half mile. It sort of dilutes the point of flashers if you are just toolin' along with them on, like all the other idiots on the freeway.

We're still in close to a state of weather siege in Atlanta, with public schools and many businesses closed, and glare ice all over the roads. The City of Atlanta is implementing its usual snow and ice mitigation program: wait until it goes away on its own. Which I'm fine with: I've been walking and biking on it, and enjoying the quiet streets. Oh, and getting the crap cut out of my face by my glasses in an iceball fight at Piedmont Park. (It's all fun and games until you have multiple lacerations and a black eye from a single nasty iceball assault.) You can email me directly if you want to see pictures.

Okay, snow day #4 in a row or not, back to work. (Really.)

Winter skies

My first recollection is a day in December 747 tracing lines through the sky


Okay, it's not December, but it's not far off. This is tonight's panorama from my balcony, before I drive to North Carolina for some skiing and winter fun this weekend.

Super busy, super good times right now. Bouncing between SW Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, and other places. Atlanta is expecting possible record snowfall on Monday, so that should be amusing to watch a city get shut down with, uhhh, a few inches of snow.

xmas spirit and bike porn! (and When Panoramas Go Horribly Wrong)

My regular readers (all four of you) know that I'm a fan of panoramas taken from my balcony. That doesn't necessarily mean that I'm technically competent, or that Hugin panorama creator will always save me (even when I spend a LOT of time manually providing stitch points.)

I nevertheless thought this was kind of cool looking, in an apocalyptic kind of way. This is a 33% version, converted to jpeg, since the full size tiff version is 7.6mb.

Speaking of apocalypse, we LOVES us some post-apocalyptic and dystopian movies. last night our netflix movie was among the worst movies I've ever actually finished watching: Cloverfield. Totally inexplicably to me, Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 76% fresh rating. Some of them got it right, though, like Brian Orndorf, from DVDTalk.com: "Basically a 70-minute YouTube video, Cloverfield has all the head-rattling jolt and dramatic verisimilitude of a prank phone call" and Kyle Smith, of KyleSmithOnline.com: "A combination of unpleasantness and stupidity that would be difficult to match, unless you were stuck in bed with the shingles while being forced to watch The Ghost Whisperer."

On another note, just in case any of you have ever accused me of being anti-christmas, or ever even CONSIDERED such an unjust accusation:


And as more evidence of it, I picked up a super deluxe xmas tree for J. From the ground. In the bike parking area at Whole Paycheck (where they obnoxiously kept storing xmas trees, so for over a week I kept having to shove them out of the way.) Here is said xmas tree:

Don't look too closely, or you might realize that it's, uhhh, about three feet by three feet. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to throw it away today, since it drips a little sap, and J and I are both going to be (separately) gone for xmas anyway.

California tomorrow(!)

Panorama!

A random evening panorama from my balcony:


Spent much of today screwing around with computers. Hawaii tomorrow. Hard to complain.

Randomorama

Looks like I'm on one of those blogging binges again. Here is a random balcony panorama from yesterday:


I got the free tickets (wristbands) for Georgia Shakespeare doing A Midsummer Night's Dream tonight in the super cutely named Shake at the Lake, and we're excited about the play. I've never seen it, and how can you not be excited about free Shakespeare? Well, I suppose you could be unexcited if it sucks. But hopefully it won't.

A report absolutely may or may not follow.

Banana panorama!

Okay, I'm arguably conflating bananas and panoramas, rather than posting a panoama of bananas. But hey, they rhyme, and I have images of both. Good times!

This is what I like my bananas to look like. Ripe and brown and ready. Yum!

And this is, as panoramas from my balcony go, a perfectly good one:

Horizontal (not rotating the camera)

Vertical (camera rotated 90 degrees.)

Generating panoramas definitely works better when I used a tripod, and using the vertical shooting format (at least when I want to highlight the sky.) We'll see if I remember that in the future.

Hiking panoramas!

As promised in a recent post about my hiking on the AT, here are a couple photos from my AT hike. Specifically, panoramas from atop Blood Mountain, Georgia:

What is kind of interesting is that they are essentially the exact same shot, taken from the exact same position, seconds apart. The only difference is that the first one was taken with the camera in a vertical (rotated 90 degrees) position, while the second one was taken with the camera in standard position. Relatively little difference, though I actually expected a little more.

Fog & rain

A few new panoramas from ATL's fog and rain, and then snow, last week:

Are the panoramas getting to be like the food porn?

Here is an inside panorama, from the bedroom/office:

And while this also isn't the worst preview I've seen, it demonstrates reasonably well how bad the previews can look:

Panorama redux, uhhhh, x4!

Okay, yep: I just had to ignore hugin's bad preview function. This is an example of how it shows up in the preview, and for whatever reason, this is far from the worst example of the preview:

The weird shadow-like rectangular shapes are an example of how the preview doesn't work well. In other previews, there were half a dozen variously diagonally tilted shadowboxes, making the image look far worse, and basically unusable. Here is the actual output for this image:

And here are a few more panoramas over a few days. Close to sunset:

Same time of day, taken in horizontal format:

And here's a weird, super narrow vertical view, since I was using the telephoto lens fully zoomed in (55mm):

Several comments I read online indicated that using the lens zoomed out would, for various obscure reasons, result in a better quality panorama. Unfortunately, for the images from my balcony, a telephone zoom at even 55mm is too much to make the image interesting, since it loses the sky and perspective of the buildings.

Panorama redux!

Since I generated and put together the last panorama, I've been getting increasingly frustrated with hugin, the panorama software for linux. Every time I generated a preview, it looked like hell, with weird box-like transparencies showing up throughout the image.

Turns out I just needed to ignore the preview, and generate the panorama, and it looks great:


That was taken about 8 this morning, as that storm begins to blow in from the west. Now I'm going to work through the other four or five folders of raw images and see if I can generate a few more.

Other worthwhile stuff I'm getting done today: writing down bicycle serial numbers and putting business cards in seatposts to aid in recovery if any of our bikes are ever stolen, advice from this great post from an ABC member, lessons from a recovered bike theft .

Panorama!

Per A's suggestion, I tried shooting a panoramic view from our balcony. The first attempt, a week or so ago, didn't have nearly enough points for the software (autopanog) to map between the images, so I took another set.

Here is the version shot using a standard horizontal orientation, which shows a 180 degree panorama from the balcony:

Unfortunately, as you see, the horizontal approach forces me to crop off the tops of the nearby buildings.

But for some reason, the vertical approach didn't do the exposure blending correctly, so I need to keep working on it.