10/11/2011. The Anti-Amy-and-David fall break vacation gave me a chance to indulge my ultra-wideangle fetish in some spectacular venues. For the record, a more typical vacation involves roads on which we have driven as many as 148 miles without seeing another car. This one was a holiday weekend trip during leaf-looking season to the busiest national park in the country and an evening football game between Tennessee and Georgia in sold-out Neyland Stadium. All in all, I'd bet a lot we don't do this again next year.
Cades Cove, near the beginning of the loop drive. Leaves are still green down low but were doing some great things at altitude, not that you could tell it from this photo. Speed limit 20 mph, the signs say. I'd've been very happy with half that. I spent most of the loop watching the brake lights of the car ahead of me to be sure I didn't do sheet-metal damage. Amy says it was gorgeous, very much like Greene County which I did get to see on the drive from the Smokies to Johnson City. It's 11.5 miles around the Cade Cove loop. It took us six minutes short of two hours to go around, with only a couple of brief stops. It's not unreasonable to spend two hours (or two weeks) in Cades Cove, but is it necessary to drive 5.5 mph? Is it just too hard to stop and look around rather than drive at a walking pace? Anyway, this is nice evening light; we finished in nice nighttime dark.
I think I need to add some "wind-motion" to the blooms. Kinda static as it is, and who needs a photo that basically features something that makes most people sneeze?
Even the alleys in Knoxville are orange and white. This is a handheld, two frame HDR to keep the sky and the roadway. All the images on this page were made with the 14mm Rokinon at F5.6 or F8 (to insure focus) at ISO 400 in RAW mode with an original Canon 5D. All have been passed through PTLens to correct the lens's inherent mustache distortion.
One street away from the downtown gameday street faire, we found this dead-quiet coffee shop in which to regroup. My iced cappuccino has been crudely removed from the table, 'cause with this wide a lens whatever is close is lent great emphasis. The coffee cup was huge in the photo. It's going to take some practice to learn to make the most of that glass. Can't remember the name of the shop; it's a couple of doors south of Mast General Store where we bought a lightweight shirt for me and a Vols tee-shirt for Amy, who was feeling a bit out of step with the orange and white masses:
Amy insists she's smiling when she looks like that. I say that the best fish tacos anywhere are made by the Blue Coast Burrito Grille -- our late lunch was so good we cancelled our dinner reservations and ordered another round of tacos instead. Note that centering the head is usually a lousy portrait idea, but when just learning the ropes of a serious wide angle lens, you can (and will) do a lot worse.
Neyland Stadium with 102,453 other fans. I picked our seats to allow a nice symmetrical mosaic like this one. That's three frames from the 14mm Rokinon manually aligned to produce a 150-160 degree panorama. The photo worked out well, the game did not: Tennessee finished with minus 20 yards rushing, our starting quarterback Tyler Bray (whom people were beginning to think of as the second coming of Peyton Manning) broke his thumb and is out for six weeks, and we lost the game 20-12 to Georgia. Still: our backup QB Matt Simms had the ball in his hands with a mathematical chance to take the game into overtime when the 4th quarter ran out, so things could have been worse. Not much, but some. It's worth looking at a higher resolution version of this image. Click here. That's still only about 15% of the full-res data.
There are some other tries made with a full-frame Nikkor fisheye and with a Russian-made 8mm circular fisheye. Check out the ultrawide sampler to see how they worked out.
There's also a set of photos of Amy buying a 90 pound pumpkin ("That is NOT a big orange," I told her) which will also need to be worked up. Maybe I'll just send them to her and let her show you what she wants via Facebook.
