Saturday, October 23, 2010

The Ardeaglais...

Been a day or two not being able to work properly on my photos because of some sickness. I shouldn't have eaten that fatty dish. I had a hard time breathing and had to take some laxatives just to get some relief to my stomach. Because of that, my plans for Failaka were delayed even more, and probably, I won't be able to go there now. I don't like to take off at 9:00 AM in the morning and get back by 4:00 PM or so, and this is how it is or even later than this time in the coming few days, until the end of October.
Been struck somehow with some mis-calculations that I've made previously for my vacation. Not that much of a difference but however, I'm losing one day here. Instead of going back to work by November 1st, I would have to be there on 31st of October. I'm still slow and need some grease to be in mood of my work place again, but looking on the bright side, I got some books that I can read. In fact, I must. It is the only time I can read freely in. The question remains then, when shall I work with my other projects? The Ayvarith webpage, and what about writing some new poems? Writing is now sort of an important part of my life and I don't want to neglect it out of sudden, even if there is no concrete inspiration leading to it.

Although I've been working partially on the panorama taken for the Lounge room, but I've stopped working on this one for some time and decided to move on to a different one completely, and in fact, one of the earliest panoramas taken when I visited Cashel; The Ardeaglais (Chapel) of Cashel Rock.

The main yard of the chapel.

Just a little explanation of the word Ardeaglais, which I use solely and specifically for this chapel. Ardeaglais is just the Gaelic for "Chapel" and it is made of mainly 2 words: ard (high, great) + eaglais (church). I learned this word when I visited Cashel Rock, and since then I've been calling this place Ardeaglais.
This panorama was taken with a wave of tourists roaming around the place. Fortunately, when combining the slides into HDR images, there is an option within Photomatix to compensate for movement in the background or foreground, and hence, lot of these movements were eliminated and only few artifacts remained, which were cleaned by simple cloning (beside the nadir of course). 
I believe the main beauty of the place is in the geometry, and that made me expand my view for such a location. I've always believed that the Little Planet projection (also called Stereo projection) is more suitable for outside panoramas rather than for panoramas taken in the inside. I did that though already for panoramas taken for the main hall at my home (and that was long time ago before I get my Manfrotto VR-head), and also once for one of our labs at work, but I can't really say I'm quite satisfied about those.

Little Planet projection for our main hall at home. The black hole is unfixed nadir point.

Gamma Spectrometry Lab in CRER, my work place.

But I have to say now, that the most amazing thing about such projection is to amaze people and keep them asking questions on how did I take such an angle. It was not until I made the Little Planet for Ardeaglais, that I've discovered that for a place with a unique geometry can produce such a beautiful pattern, pleasing for the eyes, that details are not even important anymore. At least to me I have to say.



Little Planet projection for the Ardeaglais.

Of course, beside every spherical (full) panoramas, there must be a QTVR to end my work with. The QTVR here is made on 3 versions of the original. One was done with a full size panorama (original size) which was 50MP in resolution. The file was around 23MB in size and good looking, but of course not practical when it comes to the web of course. The other 2 versions were 25% of the real size with around 2MB, and 12.5% which was around 300kb in size. Of course the latest was ideal for web purposes, which I'm putting here. I've been using lesser JPG quality to reduce the file size significantly.









I finished these over night, and literally speaking, the little planet panorama took more than 6 hours to be stitched. I noticed that Little Planet panoramas tend to take longer times than regular spherical-flat ones. I don't know what is my next stop now, but I think I will move on in order with respect to the dates of the shots. While working now and then, I think from time to time if there is a possibility to achieve some black and white images, but maybe I will use this option when I exhaust myself with colors. I didn't do much single images so far though, but that's fair enough, bearing in mind that I just got back from Ireland 6 days ago. I feel so damn dizzy right now that I'm just picturing my bed in front of me on the monitor!

On the other hand so far, I've been waiting for some delivery. I've ordered a colorimeter, which I can use to calibrate my monitor. I've read somewhere, or maybe just misread that, that I can upgrade this hardware piece into a spectrophotometer, or in other words, into something which I can use to make profiles for my own prints from my own printer. If this is true then I did get a good bargain here; Two actions into one purchase. Just waiting for the usual delay in DHL for now...








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