Harbor Looks

Serene sailboat in the bay, and then two versions of the same look at the Boston skyline.  One is of course a normal perspective, while the other is the same photo with "polar coordinates."  The bottom of the pic is curled into the center, while the top is stretched around it carrying the building with it.  Love the view it gives of a good skyline!

Skyline Panorama & Polar

Our last sights from the lakefront tour via Segway are two looks at the magnificent skyline of the Windy City, depicted from Adler Planetarium. The panaorma was stitched together in Photoshop from three photos and it stretches from Shedd Aquarium on the left through the entire downtown and includes Lake Point Tower on the right.

Below that we have a Polar Coordinate view of the skyline as a planet of its own. Certainly a planet worth visiting!

Turning the Skyline Inside Out

Loved the skyline shots taken from Mystic Blue so much that I had to take a little play time with some of the images. Changing the Polar Coordinates curves and flips a horizontal image into a globe-like view. Here we have two opposite looks, one wrapping the skyline around the globe and one wrapping it inside.

Polar Coordinate Sunset

We have not looked at a Polar Coordinate image in a while, so we complete our look at the color orange with a sunset, rearranged by the Polar Coordinate structure into a flaming ball in a yellow sky.

The Prospect in the Whirlwind

Some earlier posts have been strange experiments when a photo, often a panoramic, is distorted by what is called Polar Coordinates. Looking at the more logical picture here, Cub prospect Josh Vitters is tossing a ball underhanded from his third base position. The photo has a top, a bottom, and left & right sides. Imagine that the photo is printed on an easily manipulated balloon; the right edge is pulled into the circle and meets the left edge, upside down, from the middle to the top. The top edge has disappeared altogether into that single center point. The bottom edge has been curved and distorted into three sides of the second view.

Polar Coordinate experiments often produce interesting images (or uninteresting ones which should be rejected). Other times the experiment might do more. Considering the pressure on a young prospect, considering all the things that might indeed go wrong, considering injuries or lack of learning in the future, considering competition and bad luck: isn't every minor leaguer stretched out and wrapped into a whirlwind on his road to the majors? The more I look at this image, the better I like its poetic impression. I think it is a keeper.

A poem about how the whirlwind is manifested in Fitch Park through sight and sound:

CRUNCH OF CLEATS

Crunch of cleats, metal biting into concrete, is a traditional sound of
Baseball, one I recall as spectator, as umpire, as player, as coach.
Minor league spring training camp includes a hundred forty or more
Players, learning and working and trying to become the two stars
Who will dominate the baseball news in five to seven years.
As they move quickly from one drill location to another, they scrape
Out a furrow, digging through the smooth cement finish to the
Gravel underlayment, one after another, every spring, concentrating
On beating the path all the way to the major leagues.

Earlier posts also showed my personal magazine -- the one with just a cover, no other pages. The next issue is scheduled to appear in the next post.

Ceres -- The Goddess of Cereal

Experimentation with Polar Coordinates will yield some interesting abstracts, as we have seen. Last night I got a pretty haunting concrete image I just had to post.

The Chicago Board of Trade, an art deco masterpiece opened in 1930, has a statue of Ceres, goddess of grain, atop the building. Shot from the street on a sunny day, she glistens and looks straight down LaSalle Street from her position of honor.

Wrapping her into a Polar Coordinate and cropping off the top of an imperfect circle leaves her quite recognizable, but looking down into a pit. Perhaps a commentary on the current financial mess? Either way, a definite keeper.

New post tomorrow. No more Polars for now, guaranteed.

One More Polar Coordinate

On second thought, we will hold off the new direction for one more day to look at another strange abstract effect from the Polar Coordinates. In an email to a friend who had seen the previous post, I was writing about where to find the effect -- it is a Photoshop Filter Distort selection -- and I realized I had limited my fun with that filter.

The previous post was like most of my Polar productions, which would only be a dozen or so. In each case, I used a panoramic photo or cropped one from a traditionally-shaped photo. In each case, I selected a photo with a clear three-layer arrangement -- the river below, the bridge between and the sky above, for example. That produces the logic of the prior post, with the river at the core, the bridge and its crane as the highlight and the sky as the background. I will of course continue to experiment with such pictures.

But as I checked on the use of the filter, I happened to have a non-panoramic photo, one with nothing like the three-stripe arrangement mentioned above, and I used the process on it purely to refresh my memory on the use of the filter. I quickly used SAVE AS to hold that image and later returned to decide if I wanted to keep it. What do you think? I definitely like it and plan to do further experimentation with it.

Meanwhile, thanks for the help with experimenting in a new direction, Laura. We will move in another direction in the next post. Maybe.

Abstract from Manipulation

Look at this abstract which looks so strangely concrete. Check it carefully and see if you can spot the Illinois River in the center and awhirl around the river -- a bridge, crane and all. Look closer and you can find the seam, relatively cleverly hidden, where Photoshop changed its normal left/right coordinates to polar coordinates. Essentially, if you find the seam, you have located the left and right edges of a relatively normal panoramic photo of the bridge with the river below. The magic effect spins the base into a circular center and wraps the image for some fascinating semi-abstracts. Try it sometime!

Our next post? In a different direction to be chosen soon.