In a (New) World of My Own

I was experimenting with making my digital canvas a wee bit larger. Some would say that I embiggened it.

I missed yesterday. I was at the bottom of a pit of depression and self-loathing, so the photography had to wait. A serious pit of depression and self-loathing. I was on the teetering verge of cutting myself out of an effort to feel something. #mang

Okay. Well, welcome to Gratuitous Contrast Week, a week of contrast taken to gratuitous levels! My opener is the underground car park at Galway City’s docks complex, behind the Harbour Hotel.

This photo is technically terrible. The stitching is lazy and parts of it are either blurry or outright out of focus. But I don’t care: This photo does its job as both an exposure control test (balancing highlights and shadow) and an experiment in handling perspective correction – in Photoshop – by hand.

As a bonus the image is generally purthy.

It has a whole bunch of stitching problems that I am not going to fix right now, hence its uncropped state:

My new experiment, 360-degree paonoramas of Galway’s Shop Street, shot handheld with the help of Frank’s 10-22mm and then stitched together in Adobe Photoshop CS4. In chunks. On a netbook. Death of a thousand cuts.

‘Tis said of love that it sometimes goes, sometimes flies; runs with one, walks gravely with another; turns a third into ice, and sets a fourth in a flame: it wounds one, another it kills: like lightning it begins and ends in the same moment: it makes that fort yield at night which it besieged but in the morning; for there is no force able to resist it.”

I went in search of a ”thunder and lightning” quote to header this photopost and accidentally came back with a quote whose beauty and elegance stuck me dumb.

We’ve had amazingly fun weather for the past week: Sultry grey skies, rain, lightning, thunder and spectacularly grand cloud castles forming, breaking apart and forming anew in the air above the valley. The dawns have been gorgeous and the sunsets jaw-dropping, but my lone contributions from this are a lonely dawn panorama and some blurry lightning photographed from under the cover of my jacket.

I was surprised to find that I had not posted this here yet! Nagrand in the Outland: