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Today’s panorama photo is a photomerge of 11 pictures I took from the Brooklyn Bridge. The result you see above covers more than 200 degrees and includes Manhattan on the far left, the Manhattan Bridge straight ahead, and Brooklyn on the far right. If you look closely you can see a helicopter, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the new World Trade Center Buildings (under construction). Unfortunately, you cannot see the Geico Gecko.
At one point in time, the Eiffel Tower in Paris was the tallest structure in the world. The Chrysler Building in Manhattan succeeded the Eiffel Tower, but only for a year. The Empire State Building then held the crown.
But today’s photo is more of New York’s Grand Central Station than it is of the Chrysler Building. Finding both of these structures in the same picture is not unusual, but seeing them as you see them here is. In order to get them nearly side-by-side, like this with only the Grand Hyatt in between them, I had to take three, ultra-wide lens captures and stitch them together.
While in New York we got tickets to Tropfest 2012 which is a short film festival held in Bryant Park. It turns out that we didn’t need tickets as by the time we arrived they were letting in anyone. Most of the shorts were rather humorous, but the winning film was a documentary about homeless people and others without regular jobs recycling to earn income. The director was from Portland, Oregon. Hugh Jackman was the MC for Tropfest in New York this year. Tropfest originated in Australia and Jackman is Australian.
How this photo was made: I used Photoshop’s photomerge feature to combine multiple photos into one image. I didn’t like the result as the building in the center was really distorted–and not in a fisheye kind of way. So I took the photomerged, rectangular image (after a crop), went into Adaptive Wide Angle (under Filter in CS6), and chose Panorama as the Correction. This action mostly fixed the weird looking building in the center and gave the overall picture more of a fisheye lens perspective.
There is nothing quite so tiring as walking through a museum–the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in this case. This guy looked like he had the right idea so I sat down next to him. Within a minute or so he began snoring rather loudly. People walking by could hear his snores so they were pulling out their cell phones to take photos.
The Persistence of Memory
One of the floors of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City contains so many famous paintings it boggles the mind. In addition to the Dali, I photographed above, there are works by Van Gogh (including “The Starry Night”), Cezanne, Rousseau, Picasso, Monet, and Matisse. Unlike the museums in Europe (or at least those found in Italy and France), the crowds are not bad and photography is allowed.
After the free concert in Central Park, I got on the New York Subway to Queens to check out Citi Field. The neighborhood around the stadium is pretty grim, but inside Citi Field is one of the nicest ballparks I’ve ever seen.
As you enter the main entrance you head up an escalator and at the top are giant baseball cards showing you the Mets starting lineup for the day. These are real cards, not a video projection, so someone has to physically change these every day. The cards pictured here are from the 2012 Topps set. I’m guessing they have new ones each year.
From left to right the cards are:
Kirk Nieuwenhuis
Daniel Murphy
David Wright
Lucas Duda
Ike Davis
Scott Hairston
Omar Quintanilla
Josh Thole
RA Dickey
The actual starting lineup ended up being different so I don’t know if there was a late change or if they just try to predict the starting lineup with the cards since they have to have it in place more than a couple hours before the game, and the real starting lineup isn’t usually announced until about an hour before the game.