Sunday, February 24, 2013

Demolished Cement Factory Kaltenleutgeben

I haven't done much panorama-related during the last year...
The only 'larger' project i photographed was a documentation of the impressive remainders of the abandoned cement factory in Kaltenleutgeben (a small village near Vienna).

The factory was closed in 1996 which ended a long history of chalk and cement production in this area. Now, more than 16 years later, the buildings are already demolished to make place for a residental area. Only the heat exchanger tower will remain.

For an overview of the area, you should have a look on Wolfgang Stich's impressive aerial photos of the factory!

Cement Factory overview by Wolfgang Stich


Panorama Naming: I tried to understand the original meaning of the various productions sheds which is not easy as most crucial parts of the machinery were missing and a new factory was built around the old parts in the last century. If in doubt, i used the "urban exploration name" of the area in a panorama.

Please click on the caption below the image to open the panorama:

Overview of newer Factory Area from Chimney
Overview of newer Factory Area from Control Room Roof
Control Room
Power Station
Office Buildings
The "Rocket Room"
Roof area of Laboratory Hall
Changing Rooms
Electrostatic Filter Room
Roof overview of old Factory Area
Old Processing Tower
Old Factory Area with Worm Conveyor
Raw Material Conveyor Bridge
Raw Material Milling Hall


Top of Cement Blender Silo
Raw Material Storage Hall
Raw Material Conveyor
Flooded Basement of Cement Blender Silo
Old Cement Silos - Basement
Old Cement Silos with Worm Conveyor
Old Cement Silos with distribution Conveyors
Intersection with Conveyor Bridge
The "Cathedral" (I)
The "Cathedral" (II)
The "Cathedral" (III) - Furnace outlet
New Factory Area - Cement Mill
Electrical Racks
New Factory Area (II)
Quarry Delivery Hall
The "Loft"
Raw Material Conveyors
Pre-heating Tower
Furnace Roof (I)
Furnace Roof (II)
Worm Conveyor Bridge

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Tomb Raider Underworld Stereo 3D Screenshots

Anyone who is interested how stereo 3D gaming may look like:
You can see some Tomb Raider Underworld screenshots by clicking the thumbnail below (still not the same as actually playing the game...). The screenshots are from 3 different levels. Especially at the end, i tried to keep the 'story' intact...
SPOILER WARNING! The screenshots will reveal some key scenes of the game!

(Click thumbnail for images)

Friday, June 24, 2011

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Film is still not dead

At least for me. Still more extractable dynamic range than from a FX sensor and i love the look of true film grain...

Vienna river at Unter St. Veit, new bicycle route along the river

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Microsoft ICE Update

A new version of Microsoft ICE is available.
I would have reported earlier about it, but one of my data disks crashed and i had to restore from backup (keep in mind: even a simple backup is better than no backup!)...


Here is a selection of fixes and new features that may draw your special attention as they are putting ICE one more step closer to the group of professional panorama creation tools - and in some respect even beyond:

  • Panoramas can be created from video input:
    This is not only useful for people without deep knowledge in panorama making (e.g. you don't have to care about nodal point very much), it also allows to create various flavours of "action panoramas" pretty easy.
    The following panorama was created using this video. The result is here - uploaded without any post-processing:


  • Automatic de-vignetting. IMHO as good as PTGui and Autopano Giga. Only Hugin would beat that quality-wise (but at high calculation cost).
    ...and:
  • More robust to corrupt/mis-matching metadata. In fact, ICE is able to beat Autopano Giga in that respect. Please note, however, that this is absolutely necessary as ICE still doesn't allow any manual intervention if pre-alignment plays havoc...
    One of my favourite "test panoramas" - which was unstitchable without massive manual intervention in Autopano Giga (although APG uses the robot metadata for pre-alignment) - went pretty well within the first attempt in ICE. Only the mast on top of the tower had to be postprocessed in Photoshop: