Sunny Bedford

[Sagitar]

I took the missus into our local town (Bedford) yesterday and wandered around for a while in the unseasonal sunshine while she did the shopping. We have some new restaurants near the river and two of them appear to be open for business while there is a lot of work going on at the third one.

 

 

We have a major refurbishment going on at the local museum and I think the mural they have created on the security fence is wonderful. I will go back with the right gear if I get the chance and produce a full panorama of it.

 

 

 

The castle mound is looking very tidy. A lot of tiles had been broken on the roof of the look-out and they have been replaced recently, but already, seven or eight of them have been smashed again. How does one appeal to those of such moronic disposition.

 

 

The river looked very serene. It always seems so quiet, even on a day as good as this. I wonder whether those of us who live near it realise what a wonderful asset it is.

 

 

 

 

 

Very few boats about. I saw a safety boat and these two energetic lady scullers, but that was it.

 

 

A few swans sunbathing.

 

 

Others cruising in line-astern looking for visitors with food.

 

 

It is very worth the time to take a stroll down the embankment, as long as you don't trip over my tripod - and keep your eyes peeled for the cyclists who continually whiz by on the pavement.

 

[Rich]

Great selection of photos there Looks like a lovely place to go and relax.

[Tony]

Excellent images as usual

[phipck]

looks like a lovely place and the photographs are far more impressive than the normal publicity photos for a town.

 

as for " How does one appeal to those of such moronic disposition." it is indeed an utter shame, the only think i ever think of is to get the yobs to tidy the place up themselves, it might encourage them to dissuade others from vandalising.

[Sagitar]

I promised a panorama of the mural on the security fence at the Cecil Higgins Museum and here it is. I have compressed it as far as I can, but it still occupies 2MB. The original, a composite from about a dozen images is 132MB!

 

If you zoom it to a sensible height and then scan, you will get a good idea of the detail. It was done by families during half-term activities at the Museum. The fence is about 3 metres high so it's a sizeable piece of work. I think it's a wonderfully creative use of a temporary security fence and I understand that the Museum will use it again for similar projects during the period of the rebuilding work.

 

I had to bodge the panorama a bit in places because the fence goes round a few corners and crossed uneven ground, so it didn't start level.

 

I believe the Museum is going to use the panorama as part of its record of the project and it will appear on the Museum blog.

 

Panorama

[Tony]

That is very clever...... I wish i understood how you did that.

[Rich]

I really like that, well done Must've taken quite some time as well, did you use Photoshop?

[Sagitar]

I really like that, well done Must've taken quite some time as well, did you use Photoshop?

I do all my photoprocessing in CS5, but if you mean 'did I use the automated photomerge facility', the answer is no.

 

Each of the individual images was taken with the camera square on to a section of the fence so the camera was in a different location for each shot. The fence turns some corners and shifts vertically to follow the contours of the ground, so I couldn't just rotate the camera on a tripod as you would with a normal panorama. The result is a flat representation of a three dimensional surface. You can see what I mean in the photos earlier in the thread.

 

I resized each image so that each had the same number of pixels vertically, then trimmed adjacent pairs to a common break point on the top edge. I rotated one of the images as necessary about the break on the top edge until I achieved a common join from top to bottom of the images then used the transform and warp functions (and sometimes the perspective function) to bring the images back to a single rectangle. If any adjustment was required for exposure, contrast etc. I did it at this point, then flattened to a single image.

 

I repeated this process with pairs of images until the whole thing was reduced to a single image. I did some tidying at this point using burn-in clone etc. then did the final sizing and added the top and bottom borders.

 

It's quicker to describe than it was to do . . . . . .