Mike and Mary arrive in style at Short Hills Country Club for the annual “June Party”. Enjoy some photos of the evening.

It sure looks like my friend Jenn there in the band “August”. They are performing as part of the “Big Gig” battle of the bands at Summerfest. Summerfest is a fun couple of weeks of music in Milwaukee and I try to get there with my friend Nik for a day every year. This year we saw a number of great bands and finished up with one of my all time favorites: Reo Speedwagon!!

Enjoy the photos.

We were at Carlos O’Kelley’s for dinner since our power was out (turned out is was out for 3 days) when I received an innocent enough call saying “you might want to come out here and take a look”. It was Short Hills and I was SHOCKED when I went to see the damage caused by some “high straight line winds”. Well they were straight … straight across Short Hills holes 9, 8, 6, 4, 2, 3, 15, 17, and 13. What a mess it was as you can see in the photos I grabbed the next evening.

You could hear chainsaws running 7x24 for the next couple of weeks as our grounds crew did an amazing job cleaning it all up. You can hardly notice the damage anymore.

I traveled to Iceland week to take part in the International Virtual Reality Photographers’ Association annual meeting. What a great opportunity to learn and expand my craft! I also get to hang out with the world experts in this area of panoramic photography. This pano of Selfoss, Iceland is an example. I sat down with Joosh Nieuwenhuijse, the author of PTGui (the standard program used to stitch together panoramas), drank some Viking Classic beer, and received some great one-on-one coaching on some of my challenges here.
This panorama is composed of 92 separate frames (5 rows: -60,-30, 0, 30, 60; plus a top and a bottom) with 7 brackets (-3eV, -2eV, -1eV, 0eV, 1eV, 2eV, 3 eV) for each frame. This means that this panorama starts out as 644 separate images …
A couple of the challenges I encountered with this pano:
1. The +30 and +60 degree rows were mostly clouds and sky. Since clouds move during the shoot, it is difficult to find control points in these images to use to stitch them together. Joosh showed me how to use the “Align to Grid” feature to overcome this issue. That worked great.
2. You may notice that my panos usually have a round logo in the bottom. I have historically used this technique to cover the hole that results from where my tripod was sitting. This one doesn’t have a hole in the bottom. That’s because Juergen and Markus Matern told me how to shoot the pano to eliminate this hole. I met Juergen and Markus in the Frankfurt airport on the way here. I couldn’t have had better traveling companions.
As you “pan” around this panorama you’ll notice the conference hotel (the dark gray box of a building), a local church, the Olfusa River, and the suspension bridge that is a landmark for this town of Selfoss.