fanbloomingtastic

Being silly with my iphone panorama feature

I need some silliness at the moment. Something to make me smile despite all the terrible news around the world.

So here's something to try out (if you haven't already) if you have an iphone 4s or 5 with iOS6.

Panoramas....

Surely I wasn't the only one who adored her Kodak Advantix camera in the 90s for it's panoramic photo-setting? (or a Nexia, Futura or Konica Centuria...can't remember the names of the others).

(Yes, I know the real photographers out there did panoramas way before this, but my Kodak Advantix meant me, a beginner, could play).

Mind you, I've just been searching through my photo boxes and I can only find 2 panoramic photos I took (I KNOW I took way more than that....I'm sure I had a whole load of landscapes from the Pennines. Must have been yet another thing lost in our move to the USA). Anyway, here's one of the two, both of my kid brother's wedding:

 

 

What a lovely couple. I suppose the only thing was, this wasn't PROPER panoramic photography. It was more cropped, letterbox photography.

Well, my iphone 4s has brought the fun back into taking long photos!

I started small, just your basic 240 degrees:

 

A baseball game at the Arizona Diamondbacks Chase Field. This was about a day after the first iOS6 update came out. I finished my sweep of the ground only to see 2 other people in rows behind me doing exactly the same thing with their iphones.

If you want to know how to do this, I've got a CNET tutorial video at the end of this post.

Then when we went to Grand Canyon last Fall Break (translation for Brits: Autumn half-term), we played with the panorama feature a bit more:

 

 

Still doesn't do the Grand Canyon justice, but I defy any single photo to.....you need to see it with your own eyes, or check out the full panoramas on Panoye. Mine aren't bad for a camera phone. The light being fantastic helped a great deal. 

Then there's me doing a sweep and taking a sneaky pic of the real photographer in the family, Goth Child:

 

As you can see, I moved too fast in this one and Goth Child has no face. So at this point she relieved me of my iphone so she could play with panoramas. She had to be clever and try vertical ones....the black edges are where she wobbled before nearly falling over backwards:

 

 

And then of course, almost at the same time, me and Mr D exclaimed...."we should do the old school photo trick!"

This became a family exercise: Goth Child steadily panning around, with Melchett posing in one place then running around the back of her to get into a second position....we started modestly, yes, that's me in the cowgirl hat in the middle...

 

Then we got more adventurous, trying to get Melchett into the photo 3 times, and then topping that with swapping her hat for a different one each time she ran around the back of Goth Child:

 

I have to confess, we then got cocky and tried to get her 4 times in the same photo....it didn't work, she didn't get into spot quick enough and therfore we only have a third of a 4th Melchett:

 

 

I'm positive with practice and a little more preparation (perhaps marking spots on the floor and wackier hats and/or wigs) we could get Melchett Quads.....eek that's a frightening thought.

If you don't yet know how to take panoramic shots, here's a good tutorial from CNET:

 

 

I also need to look into better ways to display the photos or trying to do 360's (I think the iphone can only do 240 degrees at most). I'm going to investigate Panoye for certain for future 'sensible' photos of the places we roadtrip to. I could get totally lost in the beauty of the photos on Panoye, people upload, geotag and publish their panoramas there to build a virtual tour of the Earth. Check it out! I might have to try out the TourWrist app for my iphone too.

Have you played with the iphone panorama feature? I'd love to see your pics if you stick a link in the comments.

OK, back to sewing.....hurriedly trying to finish a Mad Men dress for Julia Bobbin's Mad Men 2 sew along.....but I have to confess I haven't even cut the fabric yet. Me? A procrastinator? How rude of you to even suggest it!

Laters!

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Doctor Who Impossible Astronaut Roadtrip Pt 2 - the Doctor meets Amy, Rory & River on the Monument Valley road

Following on from pt 1 - the picnic on the beach and emergence of the Impossible Astronaut, here's pt 2.....which chronologically probably should have come first as it's how the episode started...oh well, sometimes I get things in the wrong order and end up places I don't expect.

OK, for all you Whovians who have only landed on this page because you want directions, here you go:

Rory & Amy arrive on the school bus and meet the Doctor and River in Monument Valley in Impossible Astronaut

It's filmed on the l163 in Monument Valley, Utah.

Thanks to the Doctor Who Locations website we got the GPS co-ordinates are:  37°04'13", -110°02'03"

Pop that into your GPS/satnav and that will get you to the exact point.....

Trust the GPS co-ordinates....especially if you're driving from the south from the I160 and Kayenta. Because if you're like us, you'll doubt the co-ordinates as you drive nearer and nearer the iconic mountains...and then past them - they filmed from the road the other side of the mountains coming from Mexican Hat towards Kayenta.

And here are some of our pics and some from the actual show:

Oops, these are out of order again. You see the Doctor on the car....

...after Rory and Amy arrive on the school bus:

We couldn't hire a school bus...so Melchett made us one....with a mysterious driver.....I think, I can't actually remember....

And yes, I know it looks like we're not stood anywhere near the road in the episode, it's just when cars did come along it (the I163) they were really, really fast and I didn't want the kids getting run over. The bit where we took most of the photos was here:

However, there was one photo Melchett definitely wanted to be at the roadside for:

The shooting off of the Doctor's stetson by River Song:

Though I was stood by her ready to rugby tackle her off the road if a sportscar appeared on the horizon.

And here's some more fun shots we took. Mr D as the Doctor, Goth Child as Rory, me as Amy (all with our 11th Doctor's sonic screwdriver) and Melchett as little Amy (though not Amelia) and River and inseparable from a toy orange gun we bought her:

Monument Valley truly is amazing. I love that in the little clip of Doctor Who Confidential (why did you end it BBC? WHY?) I showed you the other day, Matt Smith mentions all the great films, westerns and Forrest Gump that were filmed here.....and Arthur Darvill mentioned Back to the Future III. Although I'm a great Western fan (can't WAIT for Season 7 though it's filmed in Spain), we were most impressed by Back to the Future III being filmed here too :)

Next up, pt 3 of our Doctor Who Road Trip....this time to a place used in Day of the Moon, our trip beside, on top of and inside the Glen Canyon Dam....and the funny looks the locals gave us when we started drawing tally marks on our faces :)

(All screen captures are the copyright of the BBC and appear here as reference to illustrate the location in comparison with how it looked at the time of filming and the present day; no attempt is made to supercede this or any other copyright)

Grand Canyon - no words can do it justice, and yet I keep talking...

We went to the Grand Canyon a couple of weekends ago. It was surreal. It wasn't at all how I expected it. I expected this big hole in the ground that I'd have to hold onto Melchett to stop her getting too close to the edge. Something desolate and barren.

Perhaps there are certain stretches of the Canyon that are like that. I'd love to go back to different bits of it and see. But for now we met up with some of our family from the UK doing a US roadtrip and we did part of the South Rim. Here are some pics, that don't do it much more justice than any words could:

 

The size of it was mind-blowing.....but even though you could work out the other side was a ridiculously long way away, it felt like it could easily be a painted backdrop, and that we were just part of a Truman Show world.

 

We couldn't even see the bottom, that final drop, or drops, from the ledges at the centre of this photo down to the Colorado River.

 

 

And the amount of greenery in some places, trees and bushes desperately clinging onto the sides of the rock, but only a few miles away....

 

 

It looks like something I'd imagine on Mars, or in a Ray Bradbury novel about Mars. You can see the river here though, just, in the centre of the photo.

And yet with all this majesty, one thing fascinated the kids more than anything else....

 

SQUIIRRLLL!!!

We're going on a lighthouse hunt, we're going to catch some small ones, we're not scared...

There were two things we were excited about when planning to go to Lake Havasu City - London Bridge obviously, but also the mini lighthouses we'd read about.

It's pretty weird finding 12 or so lighthouses in the Mohave Desert...until you realise London Bridge is there too.

 

This is a one-third size replica of the Two Harbors lighthouse on Lake Superior in Minnesota.

OK, so they're not lighthouses like you'd see on the coast of America or the UK. Lake Havasu's lighthouses are mini ones, but they still do their job helping keep boats afloat on Lake Havasu.

The Lake Havasu lighthouses have been built and paid for by local residents and are replicas of bigger functioning lighthouses around the USA and Canada.

This is us by a replica of the Alpena lighthouse on Lake Huron in Michigan. It's not too difficult why people call this the Sputnik.

The Lake Havasu Lighthouse Club was first formed in 2000, when local sailors wanted to improve the navigational lights on Lake Havasu. 

They've got a really fun website that shows you where all the lighthouses are and a bit of history about the original lighthouses the replicas are based on. You might want to turn your sound off looking at it, I find it relaxing but I've always been a great lover of the sea.   

Each replica lighthouse has a rotating light and some are used to mark the channel around the island in Lake Havasu to guide the boats and small watercraft that use the Lake.

The plan is to fund and build at least 25 of these lighthouses to help safer use of Lake Havasu and be an added tourist attraction to complement the draw of London Bridge.

 

This one has only just been built and is a replica of the Windpoint Lighthouse in Wisconsin:

 

The original is 108 feet tall and one of the tallest lighthouses serving the Great Lakes.

I tell you, it's not too hard to imagine what all this desert would have looked like before 1938 when the Parker Dam created Lake Havasu (just imagine this without the blue bit in the middle):

 

 

And now because of the deepest dam in the world (yes, really...and yet I still get excited by nerdy facts like this) blocking the Colorado River you get this:

 

Beautiful turquoise waters, the sound of lapping waves (generating by the wind and speedboats) and an English family who haven't seen the sea in a year overdosing on water pleasures like skimming stones and paddling (hey, it took all my efforts to stop them playing poosticks off London Bridge).

Beautiful water...

 

 

Pretty lighthouses...

 

 

Wonderfully tacky, cheesy attempts to recreate a little part of England...

 

Yep, without a doubt we'll be returning to Lake Havasu City whenever we feel a bit homesick.

I can't for the life of me imagine why, but I've got an intense craving for fish and chips now....

What we did on Labor Day (This towwwn, is comin' like a ghost town)

I'm desperately fighting the urge to put that 'u' back into Labor Day, the Americans seem to have lost it.

And no, I'd never heard of Labor Day either before we moved to the States. It's the first Monday in September and everyone is supposed to have the day as a paid holiday, but there are an awful lot of shops and restaurants still open.

It's basically like the UK's last August Bank Holiday. A long weekend to celebrate the end of summer, and officially to celebrate the workers of the United States of America. If you want some history or background on Labor Day, click here or here or here.

Some people have BBQs (or cook-outs) and invite friends and family round. The National Parks get well used. Others watch the first matches of the American Football season. And most weirdly, well to a Brit, good etiquette requires that one packs away white clothing and white shoes until Memorial Day (another national holiday on the last Monday of May...said to be the start to summer). Weird. Luckily I'm not a great white clothing fan...I'm a red and black girl, so no risk of social faux pas for me this Fall Autumn.

Anyway, WE decided to do a bit of exploring with our extra day off.

It's a bit cooler here than of late, 101 F/38 C, but that was still too hot to do anything too much outdoors for us feeble Brits, so we drove out to Goldfield Ghost Town, at the foot of the Superstition Mountains, then carried on the Apache Trail into the mountains to Canyon Lake (about 45 miles east of Phoenix).

Here are some pics that Goth Child and Melchett on our day out:

The Bordello is now a hat shop, and the church at the top of the hill actually has regular services AND does weddings. A rich high grade gold ore was discovered here in 1892 and within 5 years the town had boomed and had a population of 1,500. Like many gold camps in the area, the gold didn't last and within 5 more years virtually everyone had left, leaving Goldfield a ghost town (altogether now "This towwwwn, is coming' like a ghost town...bands won't play no more, too much fighting on the dance floor").

It's called the Mammoth Saloon and the town is on N. Mammoth Road...I have no idea if they ever had Mammoths roaming this area of Arizona...perhaps it was because they thought they had a mammoth find?

Trust my girls to be totally fascinated by a wild west toilet...

Some of the Superstition Mountains, (5059 ft) featuring Flat Iron Peak in the centre. These are part of the Tonto National Forest and part of a legislated wilderness area "where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled or unchanged by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain" (1964 Wilderness Act).

Canyon Lake, created by the damming of the Salt River by the Mormon Flat Dam in 1925.

But as Melchett was taking the photos at this time, we seem to have a lot more photos of the view point information board, showing some of the fish in the lake, and in particular:

I'm saying nothing...