It’s been a while, but sooner than later we’re about to have a whole slew of new pins and pages full of all kinds of pictures. The majority of this of course is coming from past trips and the aforementioned New Jersey trip as we continue to get this new site up to date with the map itself, so look for the Skydome, CN Tower, Ford Museum, Jersey Shore, Times Square as well as many, many other locations.Plus it looks like we’ll be heading back to RFK stadium for the final World Cup Qualifying game for Team U.S.A. as we hopefully clinch our spot to go to South Africa next year!
In addition to that, you can also look forward to a new page for Camden Yards, home of the Baltimore Orioles.
Yes, I’d been there before and its been on the map for almost 3 years now, but Kelly hadn’t been; and I didn’t really get too much time to tour around the park on my first go-around. Then we found out the Orioles give you free admission to a game on the month of your birthday! On top of that, the day we chose was $1 hot dog & drink day; which by concession standards is amazing as we could essentially get to see a Major League game and eat ballpark food for a short $15-20!
So we headed to Baltimore for the day, got in early, but not early enough for a bite to eat; so we headed to the Inner Harbor which is just a short few blocks from the baseball stadium where I fought valiantly in a battle with… my camera phone… as it continuously kept misaligning my attempts at a panoramic shot of the harbor.
For those not familiar, I have an LG Dare which has a feature on it to let you take 3 pictures in sucession and merge them to one panoramic shot. These shots are sometimes what I try to use for headers on our pin pages, as they are sometimes better than cropping images to fit a short horizontal size (such as the Ferarri shot at the Reston Towne Center).
That said… this “feature” may work more often than not; but it only works when you treat the technique as if it were an artform… and when some luck is involved…
First there’s problem A) Moving parts. You know, like boats speeding around in a harbor for example… they don’t seem to care if I ask them to stay in place as I take multiple shots of them for a minute.
Or people walking around the harbor or around (insert landmark here). So you need to develop the art of judging a moving person or object’s timing to make sure it will only appear once, and fully, in one of the 3 shots.
Then there is problem B) Me… and my apparent inability to stand perfectly still.
Doing this style of panoramic should be a simple concept: Stand in one spot take the 3 pictures to match up. Generally I’m pretty good with this easy 5 step process of snap, turn, snap, turn, snap; but via some freak change in gravity or an inner ear problem with balance, angles change… needless to say; this will not be the headline picture for our Camden Yards page:
