during a sight-seeing-tour through austria last year, i took some extra pictures of various sights for panorama-stitching. there’s a powerful panorama photo stitcher called hugin, that makes things very easy – and it’s open-source!

here’s an exapmle of what hugin can do:

i took a set of 11 pictures (not using a tripod!) to get a complete view of the collegiate church at stift melk (melk abbey), austria.

importing them into hugin, all i had to do was specify an estimation of the horizontal field of view (it’s automatically recognized from newer cameras), and hugin started computing away. [more...]

browsing through the photos from vienna, i found two very similar pictures of the church of st. charles in vienna – one taken in daylight, the other one 2.5 hours later, after sunset.
here’s a 5-step gradual blend:

as mentioned before, cindy and larry byers visited austria in late september.

we met at a hotel just outside of vienna, austria.
cindy’s gps navigation device turned out not to work in austria (contrary to what customer support had told her), and due to the combination of inner city traffic, roadsigns in a foreign language etc. they got lost. i’m pretty sure i would instantly get lost in that city without gps.
i ended up guiding them to our meeting point using my laptop, a wireless internet card and google maps.
what did people do before there was the internet, or google?

update: larry reminded me to mention the final instruction i gave them before they arrived at the hotel: still on the phone, i went out on the street, and just before they came around the corner, i mentioned “…and look out for that crazy person that’s standing in the middle of the street”. they drove very carefully. ;-)

here’s part 1 of the more detailled photographic documentation, covering bits of the sightseeing in vienna.

[view photos: vienna, austria]

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i started to “collect letters” during my trip to namibia & south africa in september 2007.
once i had sensitized myself to single characters, they seemed to stand out pretty much everywhere, and during the last 1.5 years, i was able to capture some beautiful letters, numbers and signs “in the wild”¹.

all of them are available in resolutions between 5 and 10 megapixel, which makes them perfect for “writing” something on a wall with poster-size prints, like this:

here’s a bunch of my favourites:

[view photos: a letter from abroad]

selected impressions from the perspective of a middle-sized dog.

[view photos: legs]

in our small collection of board games, there is an austrian version of monopoly from the early seventies, which my mom apparently received as a birthday gift. it has her name written on the bottom of the box in childishly written letters.
the currency in monopoly austria is austrian schillings¹, and the game has a set of two or three streets from each provincial capital.

in january 2007, at one point during a 90-minute-layover in vienna with absolutely nothing to do, i noticed i was walking through one of the streets from monopoly.
i decided to find the other two, and takes pictures.
that same year, coincidence or fate (whatever) also brought me to bregenz, salzburg and eisenstadt (forgot to collect the streets), which means i’ve collected 4 monopoly cities (including innsbruck, excluding eisenstadt) so far.

i’ve just rediscovered this abandoned project, and might try to complete it in the near future.
oh, and please ignore my old hair-”style”. i was young and didn’t know better.

[view photos: monopoly austria]

last september, anton and i came across three giant (mostly-) stuffed animals within 2 weeks. i’m not sure what made us pose like this in the first place.
this is obviously just the start of the series, i’ll add more photos as we find more of them.

[view photos: anton, i and giant stuffed animals]