Misadventures at 720nm

This time I’m going in for a fisheye-chic of Ironforge and Stormwind:

For some reason everybody wants panoramas from Azshara, an area in World of Wacraft that by player consensus is exceptionally pretty. I’m very sorry to say that “pretty” doesn’t always translate to “photogenic”.

Let’s move on from that sad note – I’m having a ton of fun capturing insanely huge panoramas in all areas of the game. The header image above is the entire Outland zone of Halaa. Fifty images, captured at 2048×1536 in lossless Truevision TGA format. After this batch I have another ten of so panoramas to go up and online, mostly from the Outland and Northrend. I’ve been sequentially working my way up to ever-bigger scenes.

How did I capture at these magical sizes? 091 Labs.

After mentioning my desire for a more powerful workstation to capture panoramas on (and also the cutting-edge video card gifted to me by Mr. Joshua and Mrs. Jennifer Tidmore of Dallas, Texas, U.S.A.), Matthew jumped in to help me assemble one. Motherboard, case, power supply and hard disk. On top of this hardware monster are running a Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04 dual-boot. We can conceivably handle almost all of the light media work you might expect at somewhere like 091 Labs:

• Still image editing. I’ve transferred my Hugin->Gimp->Mogrify workflow from my laptop, although the screen real estate and underlying performance have jumped hugely. I’m down from (up to) three hours to finding control points in a stitch to about 15-30 minutes for a big scene.
• Video and audio editing. I believe I saw somebody stream editing a video under Windows? I can build a time-lapse screencast in h.264 format and append an MP3 soundtrack in less than five minutes. Down from 20 or 30.
• 3D video game creation. Matthew has been very happily cracking away at the Unreal SDK.
• Video games. Don’t share this with anyody, but I have iWintergrasp on my iPod. And Matthew runs Portal when nobody is looking.

  Don’t ask, don’t tell

Shout-outs to those who gave me suggestions:

Illista of The Scryers server for Utgarde Keep.
Planeshaper of the Blackhand server, Sunderstruck of the Scarlet Crusade server, and Punchbuggey of the Kel’Thuzad server for Nagrand.

As places go in World of Warcraft, Kharanos in the Dun Morogh zone has a special place in my heart. My very first character was a Gnome Warlock, and it was the very first town I stopped in in the game. My first trainer. Consider that I exclusively play as Gnomes on the Alliance side of the game, I have been here a lot through the years. In honour of this fact, tonight I set out to capture a series of panoramas in and around the town. My first scene from this series of six images is a 360°x180° panorama taken from the centre of the Thunderbrew Distillery, that hub of ale-fuelled debauchery and questing.

Many people have friends. Some people like me are lucky to have glamorous friends. Thank you, Kerry, for giving me some needed Photoshop practice. :]

Jackie, thank you for the photographs! I stole them without permission.

Kinda. I mean. It is a webcam still. Maybe more of videography?

Having two blogs and trying to keep their content separate and unique sometimes leaves me at a very strong risk of neglecting one or another blog (caveat: I maintain the capability to immediately and seamlessly merge one blog into another, should I see fit). While I’ve been active on other-and frequently related-geek fronts, I haven’t really felt and strong desire to pick up a camera since mid-May or so. I know that I’ve gone through such dry spells before. I also know that eventually I will come back to photography in a strong way.

Give it time.

Having starting working with 091 Labs (/plug), and having been shown how not-difficult it is to process basic film, I’ve come up with some embryonic ideas that I eventually would love to try:

• I have a big stock of photographic paper. I could use some of it for six-month exposures.
• A room-sized camera-obscura in order to dramatically demonstrate photographic principles.
• Papercraft pinhole cameras.

Over on the other site I have really gone into a good bit of detail on the technical side of the whole webcam/timelapse thing, but here on Misadventures I want to hold forth for a few minutes on the creative side of the matter: I am really excited to have a method for painlessly capturing timelapse video, so long as I can find somewhere to put my laptop. Maybe more of this?

Last night I had my first hands-on experience with developing my own film at the surprisingly gentle hands of Sinead Williamson. Load roll, add developer, tumble, fix, rinse, and dry: That’s it.

Considering the arcane language used by regular film photographers on Internet forums and in guides I was expecting…expecting what, exactly? Bunsen burners, frightful expressions, chthonian black robes embroidered with eldritch glyphs, chanted incantations to the Exarchs of Ith. Maybe a touch of blood sacrifice too for the sake of form.

In the end, the only really cult-ish part of the night was the late hour involved. Sinead and I started on my film at 11pm (more on the night with Petra and Tommy on my other blog), wound it up at about two o’clock this morning. I crawled off to bed, while Sinead was up until past four developing her infrared film from the weekend gone.

Dedication, she has it.

Scanning at Rua Red in Tallaght was also painfully painless: €2.50 an hour for the use of a media room equipped with professional scanners and Mac Pros. Sinead gave me a good overview of the equipment and helped me to figure out what it was that I wanted (I settled on a high-resolution contact sheet with individual images suitable for web use).

Overall? I am disappointed with the quality of my output. I’m thrilled to have finally gone through the whole process of developing and scanning, don’t get me wrong. But when I look at the images produced I have to admit disappointment in the final contrast, grain and sharpness. I’m positive about this because I’m at a beginning: I can only but improve.