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I took part of Sat, March 18 to go over to California State University, Sacramento to take my
pictures for the WWP Borders event. I had picked the area around the Guy West Bridge
to be my subject for this event. I parked near Alumni Grove and walked up the stairs and
over the levee. I wandered around Alumni Grove looking for any good shots, but there
didn't seem to be any due to too much vegetation along the river bank. There weren't any
that had a clear view of the river. Since there didn't seem to be anything worth taking a Pano of I then went
back up to the top of the levee and walked along the American River
Bike Trail up to and past the bridge scouting out shots. I went down about half way to
to the 'H' Street bridge and came back taking the shots I had picked out.
The following images, with the exception of the image submitted for the Borders event, are unedited. The only processing was RAW conversion and processing in PTAssembler/PanoTools/Enblend. This means that many flaws are in these images. Lens flare, spots, my shadow, etc.
Click on the image to see the 360x180 spherical panorama in QuickTime.
My WWP submissions: http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/wwppeople/html/JoelBaldwin.html. |
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I couldn't resist this shot with these flowers in the foreground
even though I'd never tried a panorama with objects this close.
I closed the lens down to F16 and the DOF table on the lens seemed
to indicate that anything past 2' would be in focus. It seems to
have worked, although I'm not sure that the background is in focus.
The flowers are the California Poppy and are the California state flower.
As the state flower they're illegal to pick.
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I continued walking down the levee towards the Guy West Bridge. When I
reached this spot it was appealing enough for me to take another set of
panorama shots. However, . . . OPPS!! If you pan to the right you'll see that I
didn't have enough overlap between two shots. OPPS!! Lets try this shot again!
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I did the panorama again, this time ensuring enough overlap on all shots.
The building across the street is the Science Building. This time
I got the overlap correct, but unfortunately the people walking by
had left the view. Tradeoffs, better composition vs a usable shot!
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The next good shot that appeared as I approached the bridge was this one.
I like the composition of this shot and might have used this as my entry
for Borders if I hadn't had some trouble with masking during my attempts
to get the two people starting on the bridge to appear ( you can only
see one of them, which is the problem! ). If you zoom in to the
person who has just started walking onto the bridge you'll
notice that his leg is missing and he doesn't have a shadow!
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This is the shot I ended up using for the event. The composition
is ok, and I like the movement created by the bicyclist zooming by me.
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This is the view you get as you start across the bridge. From here
you get a pretty good view of the west support of the bridge. If you
pan to the right you'll be looking downstream and see the H Street bridge.
Panning to the left you're looking upstream and can see the Fairbairn Water Treatment Plant.
The two bicylists you see are actually the same person that had moved between
the shots.
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This was another candidate for the Borders event. Decent composition,
interesting shot, good view of the bridge, but it doesn't portray
all of the border themes that I wanted. *sigh* I guess that's why
I good a bunch of DIFFERENT shots. So that I could pick out the one
that turns out best.
One interesting point about this shot is the black horizontal line that is painted on the cement on the right side of the bridge support. The text above the line is "High Water 86". 1986 was a particularly bad flood year with the water actually getting within feet of the top of the levee. Where I was standing to take this shot would have been under water.
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