Everyone knows it has to go.  In the ’96 earthquake, the damage was significant and the state has been monitoring it closely ever since.  A similar freeway in Oakland pancaked cars and people in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.  Something needed doing.  But still – the view.

This is the poor man’s penthouse.  The only caveat is you can only see it at 50 miles per hour out of the corner of your eye.  Oh… and also it might kill you.  This morning, demolition on the southern mile was started.  The public got a chance to take a look from the top before it all comes down.  What you see is a freeway that probably outlived it’s useful life many years ago.

Through the expansion joints, you can see the lanes below.  Concrete worn smooth and metal chipped and rusting is the name of the game.

Construction crews are wasting no time here.  Even as people are strolling the deck, demolition is on.  I’m not sure what these guys were up to, but it was taking them a whole crew to do it.  Farther down, the bulldozers are rolling:

They’ve got 9 days to tear down the southern mile and reconnect a bypass route that traffic will be using until the end of 2015 as scheduled.  Since our wonderful political establishment has decided that the viaduct replacement will be the largest diameter deep bore tunnel ever built (like… in the world), the chances of things going as scheduled aren’t great.  Cross your fingers and hope for no earthquakes before 2017 or so.

Behind the temporary parking lot, they hung a huge banner from the viaduct.  Right in front of it, the jaws of death loom.  I thought that was fitting, but a little macabre.  So it goes.

Demolishing the Highway 99 Viaduct is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

Today’s post comes with a bonus too – name those peaks!

Panoramic mountain view from Bend OR, with labels on mountain peaks

Ah… that’s better.

Bend Panorama Done Right is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

I’m calling this Panorama Version 1.  This weekend I was in Bend, OR.  One of my favorite things about the high desert of Bend is that unlike Seattle, you can really see.  There aren’t a lot of trees to get in your way and things in town are mostly flat, while to the West, the sky is ringed with mountains.  On the east side of town, Pioneer Butte rises a few hundred feet and you can drive right to the top, which I did for this shot around sunset.

I’ll put up a better shot tomorrow.  My main problem is technological – this is 8 frames stitched together and my computer barfs when it tries to do anything to it.  As for editing, I think I’m going to take out the little swipe of clouds in the top middle – it’s just too distracting up there.  I’d also like to label the peaks.  From left to right I know we have Tumalo, Broken Top, the Three Sisters, Mt. Washington and Mt. Jefferson, but I want to check with those in the know before claiming exactly which is which.  The radio towers in the middle are on Awbrey Butte, still in town.  More soon, including a bigger full-size shot!

What You Can See From Bend is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

It’s really not too hard!  Hit the jump for the whole walkthrough!

Alright – first, credit where credit is due.  I learned basically everything here from the (often) wonderful Photojojo, so check them out.  so I started with this panorama from a couple posts back.  It had a few good things going on:

1. It’s a panorama.
2. Both the sky and the foreground have little going on.  I’ll say right here that the sky is most important – there was a dock in the foreground that I wish wasn’t there, but you can get around it.
3. They had a horizon line which was about even on both the right and left.

There were a few small problems though, and first thing is sorting them out:

1. Things weren’t perfectly level.  There are plenty of ways to do it, but what you’re shooting for are features that are the same height where they touch the right and left edges of your image.  One way to sort this out is to use the grid (View -> Show -> Grid in Photoshop) to see how far off you are, and then Edit -> Free Transform or Edit -> Transform -> Rotate to make it so the right and left sides are even.  After that crop your rectangle.
2. Things were darker on one side than the other.  This can be sort of subtle in the original panorama, but since in our new planet the edges are going to touch, you need to sort this out.  There are also plenty of techniques to do this but what I did was us an curves adjustment layer to lighten up the dark bits, then use a gradient set to lighten over the top to apply it to the left side more than the right.  This doesn’t have to be exact.  It should be, but hey – I didn’t get it right, so good enough!  On to the actual steps:

Once you have your panorama with even edges, left and right brightness roughly the same, and a plain fore and background, you’re ready to go!

1. Turn it into a square.  Do Image -> Image Size and uncheck the Constrain Proportions box.  Now you can resize (and stretch) your rectangle into a square.  Make your height equal to whatever your width is and hit ok.
2. Flip it over.  This is kinda weird, but unless you want an inside out planet, you need to start with things upside down.  Hit Image -> Image Rotation -> 180º.
3. Make the magic happen.  Select Filter -> Distort -> Polar Coordinates, then select Rectangular to Polar and hit ok.
   
4. Magic, eh?  Last little tweaking step.  Most images have a part that is more interesting than others.  I like to throw that at the top.  In this case, I liked the buildings as they stand out from the trees.  I used Edit -> Free Transform and rotated, then cropped the image to the way you see it here.

Pretty good, eh?  I really like how this looks with a gray sky and water in the foreground but it would be interesting to see what other subjects could be used.  Maybe something with a big chunk of blacktop in the front?  a bunch of desert sand?  I’ve been watching for the right place to shoot something I could use for this for probably 6 months.  Keep your eyes peeled too.

Make Your Own Planet is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

I was pretty pleased, reviewing on the camera.  Pleased enough that I forgot about the downsides.  Doing things in the dark is just difficult.  I generally like shooting things a bit farther away, because it’s really hard to tell what is and isn’t in focus.  If you have more distance between your camera and the beginning of your subject, it’s easier to get enough depth of field to get them all sharper.  I did bring along a flashlight to check focus up close, but… it becomes a pain.  I also stepped in a lot of goose shit.  That’s just how it is.  This being Greenlake, I wasn’t even worried about getting mugged for my backpack full of camera lenses.  All was good, right?

Well… yes until I got home and saw a line of blue across all my shots:

All.  The.  Way.  Across.

You don’t see it in the panorama above because they have all been laboriously removed in Photoshop.  After I found the problem, I immediately shot a few more pictures with other lenses, batteries, whatever – I wasn’t happy about this.  They’re all the same, including with the lens cap on.  Any aperture, ISO speed, whatever.  I did some research.

If you want to get technical, this is called a stuck pixel or maybe a whole row of them.  It is slightly different from a hot pixel, which would be white all the time.  All that matters is it is going to ruin my pictures.  The internet is rife with folk remedies about taking off your lens, setting your camera to manual cleaning mode (where the mirror flips up) for a few minutes and then turning it off and reattaching your lens.  Maybe it works for some people, but it didn’t do anything for me.

Since hot or stuck pixels (at least a couple of them) are nothing new, there are some other options out there.  Some cameras have options to use a dark frame (basically a picture taken with the lens cap on which should contain light only on the problem pixels) to cancel out the noise in the good frames.  The theory is that since the bad pixels are always in the same place, you can map them and work around them.  I’ve yet to find any software that works correctly with my camera and since I’m a few weeks past the grace period on Canon’s warranty, I’m still unsure what happens next.  I see a lot of healing brush in my future!

Night Panorama – The Revenge of the Stuck Pixel is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

Starting with Photoshop CS4, Adobe changed all that.  There was a panorama tool built right in, and it had a magic setting called “Auto”.  With CS5 it got even better.  No matter what you throw at it, it blends, warps, and just works magic.  The pictures always look good.  Always.  Here is my latest:

Like before, I’m posting my panoramas at twice the width of most of my pictures so you can see a little of the magic in there!

This is a shot from the end of highway 270 on the north shore of the big island of Hawaii.  Stretching out to the east is the Waipio Valley.  From this side, near Hawi, you can drive only so far, and then you can hike.  The beach below is only 20 or 30 minutes, but you can go a couple days farther if you’re stupid brave enough.  It’s a beautiful place with lazy cows, fields of waist-high grass and the odd taro patch.  It might not be obvious but this shot is a bit odd.  I’m standing on a hill, shooting down and panning the camera diagonally – sort of inland + underneath me.  In the past, this just wouldn’t work.  You’d have to map every point in the panorama by hand, and at the end of the day you’d have a distorted picture that would probably lead to a lot of rending of hair and kicking of computers.  With Photoshop CS5, you just hit go and wait.  I’d like to say I miss the old days when things were hard, but I don’t – at all.  Not only does this let you just take pictures and do what you want to do, but it means you can shoot hand-held and with lesser equipment and still have something serviceable come out the other side.  Adobe, this time, I love you.

How Photoshop Won The Panorama War is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

I just stumbled on this “park” the other day.  The Port loves providing public access in a way that is so unfriendly and hard to see that you’d never know it was there.  This spot is hidden behind a huge stack of shipping containers, but you get a great view of the Duwamish river and the goings on.

I shot this with my little S90, hand held of course.  If you want to know the difference between a point and shoot (a very good one, but still) and a real DSLR with L-series lens and a tripod, compare it to this one.  I don’t know if you can tell at this resolution, but the fine detail is really incomparable between the two.  Even so, I had my point and shoot – I didn’t have my DSLR.  You can’t take anything if you don’t have your camera.

In-dus-try! is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures