Personal Panoramic History, Part 1: 2008

With my discovery of Hugin back in January I've been combing through all the photos I've ever taken in an effort to find more that could be turned into panoramas. And I do mean combing; I've found several so far that my more cursory search in January failed to detect, including some made from as few as two photos.

I thought it would be interesting to go through my personal photographic history as seen through the lens (pun intended) of panoramas. I've been taking and making panoramas for quite some time now, and while I've put some up on this blog there are quite a number I've made that haven't appeared, either because they were made before this blog was or because I've only just made them recently from old photos.

I have a lot of panoramas, so this'll be a multi-part series. I'll try to link to posts where panoramas first appeared if they've already shown up. I've been going through and replacing the originals with the newly recreated ones, but leaving the original available by mousing over the image which makes for a really fun compare and contrast. We probably won't see those for a few parts, though.

January

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We'll start off in 2008, two years before the start of this blog and the year after I got my Nikon D40 DSLR which is still going strong over a decade later. (I got it moderately late in 2007; the first photos I still have from it are from October 16 of that year.) In 2008 I went to Jordan to dig at the site of Tall el-Hammam for the second time, an archaeological site in the Jordan flood plain north-east of the Dead Sea. It's pretty definitely the site of Sodom, as well as possibly several other cities of some importance throughout Biblical history. I was dissatisfied with the poor quality pictures I'd gotten the year before with a rather terrible point-and-shoot camera I had at the time, so I got myself a DSLR with an idea that I might also be able to use it for astrophotography as well.

I took a lot of pictures from that trip that I may see about sorting through and putting up here another time, but for now we're only interested in panoramas. And I only have two of those, both of them created semi-accidentally. Casting my mind back, in 2008 I think I would have become aware of GIMP only recently (or not yet, even), and not yet grasped its potential for making panoramas. The two sets of photos I found were created as sort of proto-panoramas, series of images taken to capture a wide horizontal expanse but meant to viewed sequentially like a short video instead of being stitched together. This being the future, however, we can go back and do the stitching now!

View from Mount Pisgah, overlooking the Jordan river valley.

The very first panorama I've been able to recreate, it's…suitably unimpressive for a first try. It looks like I took it from inside our bus whose shadow you can see on the ground. I'm pretty sure this is from a weekend trip we got to take to an old monastery that had been converted into a museum on Mount Pisgah, where Moses was shown the Holy Land and subsequently expired. From what I can tell it's looking west towards Israel over the Jordan river flood plain north of the Dead Sea (which you can just catch a hint of on the left). Too bad you basically can't see anything because of the dust and haze.

View from upper tell of Tall el-Hammam.

This second panorama, of Tall el-Hammam, comes from near the end of my stay. A quick language lesson: “tall,” in Arabic, means “hill” or “mound,” while “hammam” means “spring (of water)” or “bath”, so Tall el-Hammam is something like Hill of the Spring, named for a fresh water spring it has which is still active today (in the photo, it's hidden amongst that stand of bushy trees just left of center). In archaeology the word “tell” (basically just a slightly different transliteration of tall into English) or tall is used to refer to the hills or mounds that make up most archaeological sites.

So Tall el-Hammam is made up of two talls, or hills: the lower tall, which is roughly circular, and rises perhaps 10 meters above the surrounding plain, and the upper tall, which is narrow, elongated, much taller (pun not intended, maybe 50 meters or more?), and projects out of the north-eastern part of the lower tall like the tail of a stingray, or a tadpole. This photo is taken from the upper tall at its highest point before it slopes steeply down to the lower tall, looking out over it to the south west. Keep going in this direction and you'd hit the Dead Sea, though again you can't see it for the haze.

This panorama is a mere two pictures (unlike the first one which has four), but it still works and at least it's a lot easier to see things and make out detail compared to my first one!

The next post in this series covers 2009, when I moved to Hawaii, started making panoramas of what would turn out to be very common subjects for me, and made one of my favorite panoramas ever, never-before-seen on this blog! A hui hou!