I had a quick lunch at the Stratton Student center (not pictured above!) and when I came out, the weather had not really improved much. Initially I had planned to go to the MIT Museum, but seeing that the weather was not that great and that I did not want to drive to Hartford in the night, I decided to skip that and go straight to Harvard for a quick walk.
I often post panoramas like the one above, stitched together using a demo version I once found of a program called Autostitch, by Matthew Brown and David Lowe from the University of Columbia. I recently was reading how the panoramas are created and found it very interesting. Many thanks to Jan Erik Solem for making the book "Programming Computer Vision with Python" available with a CC license.
I spent most of my Sunday morning inside this Building, walking up and down the Infinite Corridor and waiting for the snow storm and the wind to finish. I was lucky to find an open door on one of the wings, so I could take this photo of the Great Dome. One of the few places where I have seriously considered having somebody take a photo of me with this as background. For comparison, this idea of having a photo of myself taken did not occur to me in places like Tokyo, Hanoi, Xi'an, NYC, Christchurch or Beirut, to name a few I have visited in the last few years. So finally I kept to the side of the camera that I know best. At least this time as the return trip had a nice surprise waiting for me a few days later...
First stop at MIT, battling the wind and the snow (not a good day for outdoor photography). This reminded me of my time as an intern in the aerodynamics lab in my college a long time ago, working with other fellow students to determine the drag polar of a model aircraft. I have very fond memories of that time.
I am a great fan of edX so when they asked students for stories, I sent mine. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people who have enrolled on these courses from all around the world, so there was little chance that I would make it through. But here you are, looks like my (very short) story will make it into the edX page in Facebook. Today, the first nice surprise, my face being part of the cover photo. You can check it out here edX in Facebook.
If you haven´t done it before, this is a good time to check the courses available in www.edx.org
This is what the next day looked like in the morning. Good thing about Boston, there are plenty of things to see close by. The two at the top of my list were MIT and Harvard. So off I went (driving very slowly) to nearby Cambridge before driving to Hartford in the afternoon.
By the time I took this photo, the blue hour was finished and I was tired enough to call it a day (actually a very long day due to the time difference). Just walked back to South Station and got onto the bus back to the hotel at the airport. Nice that the center of Boston is so small. Easy to understand why it´s called the Walking City.
I am usually too lazy to retouch my photos. In this case the perspective effect on the tall tower behind Quincy Market is simply a bit too much. So I gave the perspective tool in Gimp a try.
I am quite convinced that this sudden interest in correcting perspective has to do with me recently reading about image warping here. But I wonder if I have not stretched the Market and the tower a bit too much...
Some times I take my tripod for no good reason, just in case, end up carrying it around for hours and never get to use it. Well, not this time. It was already too late for my old camera´s sensor to take these photos just by cranking up the ISO (too much noise) or holding the camera by hand (exposure too long, i.e. blurred image for sure). And there came the tripod to the rescue...
Something that always gets my attention are these churches buried in between high rise buildings. The churches are not small, it´s just that the buildings around are huge.
