Photography – Page 18 – Random Connections

A Super Moon Weekend

March 20, 2011 Tom 2 Comments

Miscellaneous

It’s been a busy week, and I haven’t had much time for blogging. I’ve got a few projects underway, and I hope to write about those shortly. In the meantime, here’s a quick weekend update…

Friday night:

One of Laura’s friends from grad school at UC Riverside has a goal – to visit every state in the United States. Carolyn had two left on her list, Idaho and South Carolina. Her friend from Germany, Christian, has accompanied her on this quest, so she met him in Charleston, toured there for a day, then headed to Greenville for a visit with Laura.

We picked up Carolyn and Christian and headed down to River Place. We knew that there was a TEDx event at the Peace Center, and that evening there was supposed to be something called the Greenville Xperience in the amphitheater, so we wanted to get parked early. We wandered around the Falls Park area, walking over the Liberty Bridge and enjoying a warm spring evening, as did half of Greenville, it seems.

At one point I spotted to kayakers launching above the falls, and I knew what was about to happen. I took off at a run with my camera, but was not in time to see the first boat go over the falls. I did, however, catch the second one.

A Paddle and a Pow Wow on the Savannah River

March 13, 2011January 28, 2024 Tom No Comments

History and Genealogy, Paddling, Travel

It was the second Saturday of the month, and time for another Lowcountry Unfiltered outing. For this excursion we were headed to the heart of some Civil War history along the Savannah River. The plan was to paddle a 5 mile stretch from Beck’s Ford Landing to Millstone Landing. It turned out to be a momentous trip for a variety of reasons.

I drove down right after work Friday evening and crashed at Matt’s place in Bluffton. The next morning we loaded up the boats at met the rest of the LCU guys at their usual meeting place, Grace Coastal Church. It was a small group – five of us met at the church, and James Martin came down from Columbia to meet us at the landing.

As we drove through the town of Hardeeville, small signs with the word “Pow Wow” and arrows pointing in the general direction we were going. When we got to the turn off for the take-out at Millstone Landing, we saw the following sign…

Apparently there was a big Pow Wow at the landing. We were starting to wonder if this was a good idea.

When we got to the landing there were tents set up everywhere and things were just getting started. Parking was just starting to get scarce, but we found places for two of our cars. We loaded up our boats into the remaining trucks and drove on up to our put-in at Beck’s Ferry Landing.

Stereograph Collections

March 10, 2011 Tom 1 Comment

EdTech, History and Genealogy, Photography

I think I mentioned that while growing up we had an old stereographic viewer and collection of stereograph cards as seen above. I used to love playing with it, and it seemed like we had quite the collection. While I was still on this 3D kick I decided to check to see if there were other collections online besides the one I found at the University of South Carolina Library. It turns out that there are an AMAZING number of images available online, if you know where to look.

The first thing I did was just a simple Google Image Search for the term “stereograph.” That turned up lots of interesting hits, and some potential sources for more images. It looked like a good many of these led back to the Library of Congress, and that’s where I hit paydirt.

My first search on the Library of Congress’s site led me to the Robert N. Dennis Collection, now housed at the New York Public Library. The stereographic images in the University of South Carolina’s online collection are from this collection. Dennis was not a photographer, but a collector, and he amassed a huge collection of these image cards. Many of these depict life in small-town America, but the collection itself spans the US and includes some European shots. Dennis donated these to the library in two batches, first in the 1930’s and later in the 1950’s. The collection consists of about 72,000 stereograph cards, of which a little over 12,000 have since been digitized and placed online.

The online Dennis Collection can be browsed by state, so I was curious to see what was available for South Carolina in addition to those I had already seen. I was surprised to see that there were several images of Greenville, including one for Reedy Falls and one of the old Furman campus and Belltower.

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Geotagging “Threat”

March 4, 2011 Tom No Comments

Geocaching and Maps, Internet, Photography

Just when you thought it might be safe to let the kids out of the house, the news media comes up with even more scary stuff that you didn’t know about. This time geotagged photographs are the culprit. Two separate news outlets – MSNBC and ABC, have aired segments on the dangers of posting geotagged … Read More “Geotagging “Threat”” »

Fun with Anaglyphs – Part 4

February 23, 2011 Tom No Comments

General Technology, Internet, Photography

In the previous parts of this series I looked at ways of creating anaglyphs with Photoshop, both from old stereoscopic images and from a set of two images shot with a hand held camera. But what if you’ve already got a photograph and want to “fake” a 3D image? Well, I think I’ve worked out a method of doing that, too.

So far I haven’t found any tutorials online for creating fake anaglyphs in Photoshop. I did find Jim Long, who has done an excellent job of converting 2D images into 3D cyan-red anaglyphs. Jim as quite the gallery not just photographs, but also of classical art rendered both as stereoscopic images and as anaglyphs. Here’s his version of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa:

I don’t know what process Jim is using, but he manages to maintain color on the images very well. He also has a link to a supplier of 3D glasses with one of the most extensive inventories I’ve seen.

Fun with Anaglyphs – Part 3

February 23, 2011 Tom No Comments

Photography

In the first part of this series I was stumped because I didn’t even have a pair of 3D glasses. This time I was stumped because I didn’t have a 3D camera set-up. In Part 2 I had mastered converting existing sterographic images into 3D anaglyphs using Photoshop, and now I wanted to try my … Read More “Fun with Anaglyphs – Part 3” »

Fun with Anaglyphs – Part 2

February 23, 2011 Tom No Comments

General Technology, Photography

In my last post I talked about discovering that the South Carolina Digital Library has a new collection of 3D images. They have taken old stereographs from the Civil War era and have converted them to anaglyphs so that they can be viewed using 3D glasses. As I was thinking about how they did this, … Read More “Fun with Anaglyphs – Part 2” »

Fun with Anaglyphs – Part 1

February 22, 2011 Tom No Comments

History and Genealogy, Photography

This week I was looking for some resources on the South Carolina Digital Library (www.scmemory.org) when I saw that they have a new collection online. The collection is from the USC library, and is a collection of stereoscopic images of South Carolina.

The images were taken with a twin lens stereographic camera during and just after the Civil War. Most of these are of the Charleston area, and many show the devastation of the war, with ruined buildings seeming to be a favorite topic.

These images were meant to be viewed with a stereograph viewer, similar to the one seen below:

The image card would be placed in the holder, and the off-set images merged into a 3D view in the viewer. When I was growing up we had one of these antiques and a collection of cards, and I loved looking through them.

Flickr to Panoramio – One More Attempt

February 18, 2011 Tom No Comments

Geocaching and Maps, Photography

I really want to contribute to Panoramio. Really, I do. I would love to have my photos show up in a native layer on Google Earth without having to use a third-party KML/KMZ file. So I’ve been looking for work-arounds for their security problems and inability to upload more than 10 images at a time. … Read More “Flickr to Panoramio – One More Attempt” »

Rethinking Panoramio

February 17, 2011 Tom 5 Comments

Photography, Rants

Last post I was singing the praises of Panoramio for location-based photo sharing. I’ve uploaded a bunch of photos, and had 250 approved for Google Earth. I was quite flattered. The selected photos included some of my best shots, and covered the entire US, from Florida to Maine, to Washington State. …and as of this … Read More “Rethinking Panoramio” »