Bodrum, Turkey

A few photos from my recent holiday to Bodrum, on the South-West coast of Turkey.

An Aladdin's cave of spices, dried produce, and plenty more inside.
An Aladdin’s cave of spices, dried produce, and plenty more inside.
Yachts outside Bodrum Marina...
Yachts outside Bodrum Marina...
...and inside the Marina...
...and inside the Marina...
...and at night
...and at night
St. Peter's Castle in Bodrum at night
St. Peter's Castle in Bodrum at night

The captain's wife on the sail home
The captain's wife on the sail home
Black Island, off the coast of Bodrum
Black Island, off the coast of Bodrum

Sunset at the Cafe Delmar, Bodrum
Sunset at the Cafe Delmar, Bodrum

Pamukkale, Turkey

Pamukkale is a fascinating natural wonder in South-Western Turkey. The sides of a large hill are covered in Travertine Terraces – calcium carbonate deposits left by thermal spring waters. I visited on an overcast day, so the photos I got don’t do the site justice. You’ll find plenty of photos online of snow-white slopes against bright blue skies…

Varied Textures of Pamukkale
360 Panorama of Pamukkale
360 Panorama of Pamukkale

The drizzle didn’t dampen my enjoyment of the thermal waters in Cleopatra’s Pool, replete with sunken ruins from Hierapolis.

Underwater chasm in Cleopatra's Pool
Underwater chasm in Cleopatra's Pool
Sunken ruins from Hierapolis
Sunken ruins from Hierapolis

 

Costa Rica – Panoramas

I spent a few hours over Easter putting together some of the photo stitches that I took in Costa Rica. There are two stubborn ones which I’m not having much joy with (very wide angle both horizontally and vertically, so the resulting photo looks very fish-eyed). Here are five of the panoramas which came out great.

You can scroll around the panorama in the Java Applet linked below. You can drag the view around with your mouse, or use your keyboard’s arrow keys. Pressing – or + lets you zoom out or in, although the images are displayed at 1:1 resolution already.

Arenal Volcano: Panoramic view of the very-active Arenal Volcano, taken from the Lost Iguana hotel, to the east of the volcano. Lava flows can be seen on the left hand side of the volcano. 28 megapixels.

Arenal Volcano
Click to view panorama

Irazu Volcano: Panoramic view of the two craters at the top of Irazu Volcano, the highest active (but dormant) volcano in Costa Rica, at 3,432m above sea level. The main crater on the left contains a green crater lake. 78 megapixels.

Irazu Volcano
Click to view panorama

Poas Volcano: Panoramic view of the crater lake in Poas Volcano (2,708m). The lake normally appears bright turquoise when conditions are clear (rarely). You can see yellow puffs of sulphur to the right of the lake. 23 megapixels.

Poas Volcano
Click to view panorama

Sunset from Finca Rosa Blanca, Santa Barbara: Viewed from a coffee plantation in the hills. 72 megapixels.

Sunset
Click to view panorama

Rainforest of La Paz Waterfall Gardens: Panoramic view of the rainforest around the La Paz Waterfall Gardens, near Vara Blanca. 17 megapixels.

Rainforest from La Paz Waterfall Gardens
Click to view panorama

360 Degree Panorama of Cambridge in the snow

Well, it took 2 weeks to get round to finishing off the photo-stitch – it was a tough one, took several attempts, lots of manual tweaking, and it’s still not quite perfect, but good enough! There were 36 photos, and the final cropped panorama weighs in at 56 megapixels.

You can scroll around the panorama in the Java Applet linked below. You can drag the view around with your mouse, or use your keyboard’s arrow keys. Pressing – or + lets you zoom out or in, although the images are displayed at 1:1 resolution already.

Cambridge in the Snow: Panoramic view from Castle Mound. Visible in the panorama are the University Library, King’s Chapel, St. John’s Chapel Tower, and lots of snow!

Cambridge Snow Panorama
Click to view panorama

Landscape fading into the sunset

Another clear and mild day in Cambridge, so I took my camera out to capture some of magic hour. This time, I wandered around the St. John’s backs briefly, before heading up to my favourite haunt, Castle Mound, to watch the sun set.

Reflection of trees at sunset

Reflection of trees at sunset

Reflection of St. John's College

People watching the sunset

Airplane trails

These next two photos were taken 4 minutes apart, and are quite similar to a stunning mountainscape I took in Edinburgh. I love photos where the landscape gradually fades to grey in the distance. I can’t decide which I prefer, so here are both of them!

Landscape fading into distance as sun sets

Landscape fading into distance after sunset

Crossing pink and white airplane trails

Orange clouds after sunset

Cambridge Sunset Panorama

I took a panoramic view of a stunning sunset back in November 2005, viewed from Castle Mound in Cambridge. Lord knows why I waited a year to stitch together the photos. I only stiched about 340 degrees of the view, so don’t have a full wrap-around, but there were 40 photos, resulting in an output file weighing in at a hefty 108 megapixels. I’ve cropped it down to 70 megapixels, as much of the dark ground isn’t interesting. What prompted me to take the full wrap-around is that the pink clouds are visible across the whole sky, not just over the setting sun. Friends have asked how I get such colours – I just capture what nature does best – amaze us with its wondrous beauty.

You can scroll around the panorama in the Java Applet linked below. You can drag the view around with your mouse, or use your keyboard’s arrow keys. Pressing – or + lets you zoom out or in, although the images are displayed at 1:1 resolution already.

Cambridge Sunset: Panoramic view from Castle Mound. Visible in the panorama are the University Library, King’s Chapel, St. John’s Chapel Tower, and the moon.

Cambridge Sunset Panorama
Click to view panorama

I also took a second set of photos of the same sunset. Much of the sky on the left was too dark to keep in the panorama, so I cropped this one down to 31 megapixels:

Cambridge Sunset Panorama

Panoramic Photos from Italy

I travelled around Italy in September 2006, and took lots more photos, including a few sets of photos which stitch together to form panoramic views. I took two 360 degree panoramic views, in Venice and Sienna, which are shown in Java Applets below. You can drag the view around with your mouse, or use your keyboard’s arrow keys. Pressing – or + lets you zoom out or in, although the images are displayed at 1:1 resolution already.

Venice: Panoramic view from the Campanile di San Marco, about 100m above St. Mark’s Square. Visible in the panorama are St. Mark’s Square (with its multitudinous pigeons), the Doge’s Palace, and St. Mark’s Basilica.

Venice Panorama
Click to view panorama

Siena: Panoramic view from the Campanile, about 100m above the Piazza del Campo
Siena Panorama
Click to view panorama

Milan’s Vittorio Emanuele Arcade

Milan Panorama
Click to view panorama

Verona at night

Panoramic Photo of Verona at night

Positano

Panoramic Photo from Positano beach

Hi-Res Panoramic Photos

During my trip to South Africa, I took several sets of photos at various stunning vistas, which I would stitch together back home. Well, now that all the other photos have been tweaked and added to CantabPhotos, I’ve started stitching some of them together (I use the open source stitching software Hugin, along with Autopano). At Blyde River Canyon, I had taken 19 photos at 8 megapixels, and once I’d cropped the resulting stitch down to the region I wanted to keep, I ended up with a 26 megapixel image, with 19 Photoshop layers. I very painstakingly checked the blending/overlap of each layer to ensure no seams were visible at all (it took me about 5 hours!). I ordered a 30″ x 14″ print of the panorama (printed and delivered next day by Photobox), and it looks absolutely stunning.

Panoramic photo of Blyde River Canyon

I also worked on a panorama of the Cape Town City Bowl, taken from Table Mountain, (17 photos at 8 megapixels, this time it produced a 37 megapixel image), which has stunning detail when zoomed in fully. I got that printed at 30″ x 6″ (the largest Photobox could print it), but would ideally like to get it printed to 100″ x 20″. I’ve shown a very low-res copy of it below, along with a full resolution crop of the downtown and waterfront area.

Panoramic photo of Cape Town Bowl

Well, I may as well add the rest of the panoramas in here as and when I stitch them together. This first one is of our first fine Capetonian sunset, from Signal Hill. The peaks are, from left to right: Devil’s Peak, Table Mountain and Lion’s Head. This panorama weighs in at hefty 55 megapixels.

Panoramic Sunset from Signal Hill

Next panorama (25 megapixels): The Twelve Apostles and Camps Bay bathed in the golden light of Magic Hour – the last hour of sunlight. This was taken from La Med, where we often went to see some amazing sunsets.

Camps Bay in golden light

I had to define the control points of the next panorama manually, as the images were too dark for AutoPano to work with. 5 photos, each one a 30 second exposure at 1600 ISO, combined to create a 12 megapixel widescreen panorama of the Milky Way.

Milky Way