travel – Richard Mudhar

Scorhill Stone Circle panorama

I wanted to try out panoramic photography at Scorhill stone circle near Gidleigh in Dartmoor as well as tinkering with radio. I didn’t have much time there, it’s a tough drive through winding roads and Google maps had already warned me that I had about an hour on site tops if I wanted to make a meeting in Exeter in the afternoon. It’s worth a rematch, because there’s quite a lot of interesting stuff within a mile, what with the Shovel Down stone rows and possibly another circle to the northwest.

A long time ago I had ambitions to take panoramic pictures of stone circles. The moving panorama thing really sings with megalithic stone circles, they don’t move so much so you don’t need video for the immersive experience, and we have 900 stone circles still extant in the UK, mainly in the west of the country. Those were the dotcom days of Apple QTVR and plugins, and hardware that was only just up to the job. QTVR is pretty much dead now. Backwards compatibility isn’t really in Apple’s DNA. The problem with QTVR was these had to be encoded in that format, because computers weren’t hard enough to do the processing of the source file on the fly like Panellum does. So these images are lost in Apple-history-land, although the source files I do have show just how poor digital cameras were¹ in the 2000s, the pictures won’t particularly benefit from being QTVR un-munged and re-munged to whatever is the panoramic tech of the moment. On the plus side, the stones are still there so a reshoot is possible 😉

Panoramic photography images are big – the panorama is 1Mb in size, so I’ve put it after the read more break. They aren’t as big as John’s trig point images, but the great advantage of a stone circle is that all the action is in the near field, you don’t have to zoom in so much.

dogs and dappled light

I shot these pics raw, because there was a weak sun through the haze, so I thought I could push some of the shots, However, the weak sun came through dappled cloud, and Sod’s law seemed to say that in one direction the cloud closed in again just as I passed the same direction the second time². I have a Kaidan Kiwi-L and it is sweet, compared to trying to spin round a stone circle on a monopod with the integral level. Some of the win is that the click stop forces you to take enough pictures, and you can mount the camera vertically. There are much cheaper ways of doing this now – well, after you have amortised the cost of the 3D printer.

Kaidan made a big fuss of how you should adjust your camera so it spins around the nodal point, and early software used to be critical on that. I do still try and match that, but either Autopano Pro is a lot less critical of getting that right or I have become a slovenly panorama maker because it seems less critical now. With a stone circle much of the action is at a reasonably constant distance from the lens and the foreground is often miscellaneous grass so maybe a bit of parallax error in the foreground isn’t seen so much as when doing a panorama in a building, with all its straight edges calling out a poorly centred camera.

Scorhill has a lot of human traffic – dogwalkers abound, and I waited about 10 minutes while a lady did her callisthenics in the stone circle. This shortened the photoshoot, I just about took the Kaidan twice round the circle in varying light before some more hikers with a huge hound hove into view and I figured I needed to clear site to head off to Exeter. I could push the exposure for the darker pics, but the problem is the light is different as the sun went in, so they don’t match well.

lighting for panoramas

I need to think differently about lighting for panoramas, since they’re inherently more tricky. You can’t keep the sun behind you with a panorama by definition, and the golden hour is also not ideal. What looks great on a still in one direction will be the sun low in the sky and great big long shadows in the other. Exposure is easy with an overcast sky, but that sky is so boring. It’s probably safe to say too much contrast is a problem in panoramas, because many of the photographer’s tools to minimise it can’t be used through 360 degrees

Probably the best light for stone circle panoramas is a blue sky with plenty of fluffy clouds, one of which is over the sun for the entire duration of the panoramic spin. Panoramas may be more suited to the mid-morning and mid-afternoon, a little bit off the ghastly high-contrast sun overhead at noon time and get some shadows to give modelling but before shadows get out of control.

Look ma, no Linux

Getting away with modest zoom ranges is just as well, because you seem to need Linux to run the splitting program generate.py to get multiresolution images. I don’t have a GUI on my linux box and have already had to rebuild it three times when some software digs itself into a hole I couldn’t get it out of. So when I spot requirements like so

To be able to create multiresolution panoramas, you need to have the nona program installed, which is available as part of Hugin, as well as Python with the Pillow package. Then, run

I think, right, move along now, nothing to be seen here…

When I tried Hugin years ago there was some hoohah about the patented SIFT algorithm, so you got to manually select the tracking points, involving lots of swearing when it didn’t work. Life is too short for that sort of thing.

So I bought Autopano Pro, and they were nice enough guys to trace my license key even though 11 years have passed and I have a new email address, so that is how I process my panoramic images. Kolor is now closed.

It appears that the SIFT patent will expire next year, which is good. Software patents suck. If they exist at all, they should be on a much shorter scale – software and Internet time is shorter than dog years so a maximum term of five years would let you get dominance without jamming progress in a field for over twenty years.

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John Dee, Queen Elizabeth I Astronomer-Royal’s magickal scrying mirror in the British Museum

The British Museum in London is full of all sorts of oddball items. Some of the things on the ground floor are much more in the line of the cabinet of curiosities than the themed collections upstairs. As you turn to the left after coming through the main entrance there is a Victorian room dedicated to the Enlightenment. Although the cabinet of curiosities approach is frowned on nowadays, it appeals to the randomly curious part of me. It’s home to a small collection of John Dee’s magical items

Here we have John Dee’s obsidian scrying mirror. Obsdian is apparently a natural volcanic glass formed from solidified lava, and can be polished to a smooth dark surface. I didn’t notice from the description, but apparently this comes from Mexico via the Spanish.

It’s the devil’s own job to get a picture of this in the dim light of the Museum, and taking a picture of a black object is never tremendous fun. John Dee entered Cambridge university at 15 and graduated two years later. He taught at various European universities before returning to England when he was 24 to teach navigation and mathematics to captains of the British Navy, playing a key role in the fight against the Spanish Navy.

Astronomy and astrology were linked disciplines at the time. Dee was imprisoned in 1553, allegedly for casting a horoscope for Elizabeth, Queen Mary’s sister and heiress to the throne. It’s easy to see how he got into hot water – the horoscope indicated Mary would die, and Dee was charged with attempting to kill Queen Mary with sorcery. He was released in 1555. Elizabeth became queen in 1558, and Dee’s fate improved.

Instead of scrivening mirrors we have computers and they operate not on unseen angels but on unseen electrons. Because of his failures Dee remains modernity’s dark and forgotten twin. We are able to live in a world that he could conceive of, but one which he could have never invented.

Ed Simon, Notes on John Dee’s Aztec mirror

Enochian Magic and Angelic contact

Dee is best known now for his work on occult phenomena and contact with the spirit world, which he began in earnest in 1581. He found this contact hard, so he starting doing this work third-hand, by employing gifted ‘scryers’ – people who could see the spirit world directly. Using scryers enabled Dee to take comprehensive notes. He first worked with one individual, Barnabas Saul, until Saul was burned out from some disturbing encounters, and Dee searched for a replacement to help him.

In 1582 he found him, in the form of the imperfect rascal Edward Kelley. Kelley was a sensitive, but also a charlatan, whose ears had been cropped for forgery, so he was difficult to use as a witness. Dee’s notes indicate that in November their spiritual research encountered the Angel Uriel, who instructed them to create a talisman that would make communication with the spirit world easier. Dee and Kelley constructed these and other magickal tools.

John Dee’s wax tablet with Enochian script

This breakthrough led to Dee using a novel language called Enochian script, and the pair made significant progress, and their fame spread. This led to sponsorship from a Polish noble, who was dazzled by Kelley’s scrying ability when he came to England, and who funded the pair’s attempts to discover how to transmute iron into gold. When the noble’s money ran out, Dee and Kelly were sent to Prague with a letter of introduction to Emperor Rudolph II. This began auspiciously, as Rudolph was also attracted to the possibility of the Philosopher’s Stone, but naturally their experiments always remained on the verge of success without actually delivering.

Dee’s reputation as a wizard caused problems at home in England, where in 1583 a mob attacked his home in Mortlake and destroyed his books and instruments. His fortunes started to decline when the Pope instructed Rudolph to expel Dee and Kelly, and they sought sponsorship for their work from King Stephen of Poland and another noble, Count Rosenberg, who accommodated the pair in his castle.

Kelley’s mischief meant that they parted their ways when he made some unreasonable demands of Dee, who then returned to England in some style in 1589. However, without Kelley he now relied other scryers who were even less reliable than Kelley. Dee held a few more posts before retiring in 1603. Dee died in relative poverty in 1608 – Kelley had perished in 1595 jumping from a window escaping from a Prague penitentiary.

A fascinating diversion into Elizabethan intrigue and mystical inquiry, brought on by a chance visit to the Enlightenment room. A few cabinets down is fellow Cambridge alumnus Stukeley’s romanticised picture of A British Druid in his 1740 book “Stonehenge, A Temple Restor’d to the British Druids”

Picture from William Stukeley’s Stonehenge, A Temple Restor’d to the British Druids

which is why Druids have been associated with Stonehenge ever since. All part fo what makes the British Museum a wonderfully diverse way to pass a couple of hours in London.

Norfolk in January

January has been quite sunny and mild this year so I visited the snowdrop walks in Walsingham abbey gardens. It was turning colder for the first day of the snowdrop walks

Only a few other people braved the cold on the first day

but it was a decent show for the end of January!

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