Return to the Marsh
I could see that the lens was still extended... I was the happy owner of 483 new aerial photos of Otter View Park. November 18, 2011
Above Crown Point
In honor of the opening of the new Crown Point Bridge across Lake Champlain (scheduled for Monday, November 7, 2011) I took my last free ferry ride and flew the Canon Powershot S95 over the Crown Point State Historic Site for three hours last week. The south wind was strong and steady at about 15 mph, but the Levitation Delta kite wandered a bit much to get good coverage for easy panorama stitching. I learned some new finesses of Microsoft ICE and was able to make some decent scenes with as many as 28 stitched photos, but could not construct a half-spherical panorama.
Fort St. Frédéric and the new Crown Point Bridge. See below for a link to the big view of this panorama.
Otter View Park
It didn’t seem windy enough, so I plucked dried heads of orchard grass and tossed them into the air. The live feed at WeatherUnderground.com had been reporting 10-12 mph NW winds at the Ralph Myhre Golf Course a mile away, but the grass was falling almost straight down here. On a knoll in the center of the field I felt a breeze, so I took off my pack and assembled the nine foot Levitation Delta kite (with wind less than 15 mph, the Sutton Flow Form 16 would stay in the pack). The delta flew out of my hand and climbed easily to 100 feet. It was flying to the south, not to the east over the cattail marsh I wanted to photograph. Otter View Park in Middlebury is the focus of Galen’s community service project, and he has been describing the plant communities in that marsh. I would not be able to photograph much of it today unless the wind shifted. read more…
Return to the Nubble
I went over to the Adirondacks last Wednesday and came back with 1900 photos. Most of them were taken by my Gigapan imager, and half of those are duplicates that will never again see the light of day. Before I even got to New York, I took 126 handheld photos from the Lake Champlain ferry, 48 of which got stitched into the three-row panorama below of the new Crown Point Bridge, still under construction. Back on August 26, the day the central “network tied arch” was lifted into position, I came to repeat the gigapan I took of the old bridge. But the place was crawling with gawkers, and the men in hard hats would not let me get to the place from which the earlier panorama had been taken. So I left defeated. If you missed it too, you can relive the raising of the arch with the fully archived construction webcams, but you have to click through a lot of photos to get to 3:30 PM on August 26 when the action started. read more…
NOrtho Photo
Aspen seedlings and fireweed in a burned study plot.