I’ve Moved!
November 20, 2008
So I’m sure that most people have noticed that the site has been offline for a few days. There’s a reason for that, which I will get to shortly. But first, let me just say this:
In fact, I am blogging at a new site I have just finished setting up: kennethhynek.net. A full explanation for the reasons behind the move can be found here
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That said, this is not the end of Time Immortal. My wife Grace has expressed interest in taking over blogging at this domain, and I am working to make sure that she gets set up here as soon as possible.
Also, my profound apologies for the modification to the site face; the move was not as seamless as I would have hoped, and many of the image files for this theme, and in the gallery, were corrupted during the course of their evacuation from my previous web host’s servers. Until such time as I have repaired them, I’ve put a clean-looking template in place of the previous one.
Update: for the purposes of further traffic shaping, new posts from kennethhynek.net will be excerpted below. Full articles can be read at the new blog.
Pic of the Day #484
January 16, 2008
Looking out over the Ancient Agora from in front of the Temple of Hephaestus, I felt moved to take another panoramic image. Unfortunately, it was a very cloudy day in Athens, but I think that the resulting image, despite the lack of blue sky, is nonetheless quite impressive.
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There are quite a number of images comprising this shot (if memory serves, it’s a matrix of images, at least five across and two high). As has become my usual practice for panoramic images, I began by matching exposures between shots in Lightroom, and then cleaning up things like chromatic aberration and doing some highlight recovery. With that out of the way, the images were imported into Hugin, and if memory serves I defined an absurd number of control points (as many as 30 between just two images!) in order to get some of the details (like the Stoa of Attalos, over there on the left) to line up neatly.
The render took a while as well, although it’s less painful using Hugin on my work computer (with its Core 2 Duo processor) than on my Powerbook G4.
And the result? Well, you can see for yourself, O Reader. It’s a commanding view of the Agora, and also gives just a hint of an impression of what ancient Athens must have been like.
Pic of the Day #476
January 8, 2008
Once we left the Areopagus, we made our way north toward the Ancient Agora, which in days of old would have been the site of the marketplace (and some residences) of Athens. Along the western side of the Agora rests the Stoa of Attalos, a large covered portico (now converted to a museum) built some time between 159 and 138 BC.
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I took the reciprocal of this image, but didn’t like it as much due to the higher number of people in the shot; this one has almost nobody visible in it. The stoa is impressive, to say the least, constructed as it is of (very finely polished!) marble and limestone. The 2003 European Treaty of Accession was signed there, for those whose tastes run to more recent history.
Edit-wise, I did a bit of highlight recovery and fringe reduction on the shot (especially in and around some of the pillars on the right). The day I took this was marked by a fairly persistent cloud cover, so there are no hints of blue to be found (unfortunately) peeking in between the columns. That said, the image gives the reader a very good idea of just how well-kept this structure is, and how impressive.
