a magical view of herzog-otto-strasse, taken from just below the golden roof:

panorama: herzog-otto-strasse, innsbruck

a happy new year and all the best for 2010 to all of you!
i apologize for the extreme level of inactivity on my blog. hopefully, i’ll be able to post a picture or two every now and then.
instead of the annual picture of fireworks, i’ll post something else in this place:

it’s the view of the norhtern mountain range (nordkette) in mid-december. the view is from approx. 200 meters from my place. i used hugin to stitch 18 photos together for this panorama.
 

this year, try something new and do something you’ve never done before!

markus

here’s a panorama from last sunday:

panorama: dress rehearsal with the choir and orchestra

it was taken during the dress rehearsal (the bass was on tacet), a few hours before we performed j. haydn’s theresia mass with the wilten boys’ choir (wiltener sängerknaben) and innstrumenti orchestra.
an ingenious piece of music!

a week ago, i drove past a cornfield with so much poppy in it, it could have easily been considered an opium field with a little corn.
it was so beautiful, i got off the bike and spent the next 15 minutes trying to capture the scene.

panorama: corn field with poppy (papaver rhoeas)

just now, while uploading, i tried to remember where exactly that field was. i ended up using google earth to compare the lanscape and mountains, and retraced the location in no time: the area just east of volders, austria.

[view photos: cornfield panoramas]

on my first outdoor bike training unit this year, my mountain route featured an unexpected obstacle: an avalanche that buried about 30 meters of the forest track with several meters high of snow. turns out walking through a snowfield with ordinary sneakers and a bike is not as easy as it sounds.
the following day, i brought my camera and tripod. :)

[view photos: avalanch field]

in 1949/1950, the creation of lake resia reservoir (de: Reschensee) resulted in the flooding/submersion of several villages. while most of the buildings were demolished, the old roman bell tower was left intact (for reasons of monument conservation), and is now the only reminder of the lost villages and forjudged residents.
lake resia is sometimes referred to as “atlantis of the alps”.

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...]