Maxwell Kruger Photography

So I was playing around with this software called SPi-V. It’s a web-based, video-accelerated engine for viewing panoramic images. I loaded in one of the panoramic images I shot this past spring in Arizona, from Monument Valley. After some Photoshop work to get the edges to line up, I was able to create a cool little page to display the huge image (over 19 megapixels after resizing to a workable resolution) in an interactive manner. You can see Dan shooting pictures of The Thumb if you look close enough. Check it out.

(It requires Adobe Shockwave which can be downloaded for free here: http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/)

I got back from Europe about a month ago…it’s been a long time coming with the photos but I’m finally done. Below the jump are some photos and the full album from the trip is at photos.maxwellkruger.com/Travel/European-Delivery-2008/.

We started in Munich, went east to Freiburg, to visit Chris and Berni at the university there, then went down through eastern Switzerland and also hit up Austria and Italy. Then we got news that we could visit Chateau Miraval, the Chateau that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are renting out and going to buy for $70M, if we could make it down to the south of France by the next morning. We drove through the night, got a few hours of sleep, and visited the next day. Did wine tasting and also got a tour of the studio there that such albums as Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Rammstein’s Mutter were recorded. Got to listen to the albums in the same space they were originally recorded! Then we headed down to Cannes and Nice and spend two days there, each. On the last day, we took 3 hours before we had to turn the car in and drove the Col de Turini. Amazing road, wish that we had spent more time on it!

I carried a small GPS receiver with me which recorded the route. I’ve downloaded the trip files and wrote a little web app to see the route that we took. Check it out here – home.maxwellkruger.com/europeandelivery/. If you turn on high detail, you can actually zoom in and see to the foot exactly where we were at most stages of the trip. If it’s running too slow for you, try to turn down the detail. Also, this means that most of the photos are geotagged so if you open them up in the gallery, you can view them on a map.

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I leave tomorrow to Germany to pick up my new BMW 135i for European Delivery. I’ll be driving around Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, and France. I’m dropping my car off at the shipping handler in Nice, France in about a week. I’ve spent the last few weeks testing photo equipment and I’ve gathered everything I think I’ll need. I was putting it all together today and thought it was funny how much equipment I’m actually bringing. Below is a picture of some of the stuff that’s going into my carry-on only luggage.

Click on the photo to enlarge.

As previously mentioned, I have created an even newer photography portfolio to display my work. I was unsatisfied with AutoViewer and wanted a bunch of features that no one else had so I coded my own flash viewer over winter break. I spent about 2 weeks straight working on it, so check it out!

www.photomaxwell.com

I have created a portfolio showing off my photography work. Please view it here: http://www.maxwellkruger.com/photo.

I created this about 3 weeks ago and am already working on a new version using a custom flash viewer that I’m writing.

I’m launching a new mini-site to display some of the panoramic scenes that I’ve photographed over the years. I’ve always enjoyed shooting them and stitching them together, but there has always been the problem of showing them to others over the web because they are so large and wide. I’m using a flash image viewer called Zoomify that allows viewers to zoom in and pan around the full resolution image. It’s really cool and allows me to show off these awesome pictures in full detail. Check out the new site at www.maxwellkruger.com/panoramas.

My dad’s company cleans the windows on the Maryland Science Center, including the window on the projection room of the IMAX theater. Since he knows some people in charge at the Science Center, they were able to give us a behind the scenes tour of the theater when Ed and I went to see Deep Sea 3D there, before the movie started. Here are some cool pictures of the projection room.

The projector (says IMAX on it) and the screen (purple) in the distance. The projector is both liquid and air cooled. The big pipe you see is the exhaust pipe from the air. There is another room adjacent to the projection room that has loud equipment in it. There were two power inverters to change the current from A/C to D/C which is required for showing films or else the alternating nature of A/C would interfere with the framerate of the film. The other room also had an air compressor and cooler that was used to blow air onto the film to keep it at the right distance from the lens and cool the air to keep the projector’s two Xenon bulbs cool.

This is the 3D setup, with both angles of Deep Sea 3D on the top and middle spools. This is a newer setup that doesn’t require the film to be rewound after it’s shown because it is fed out of the middle. This reduces wear on the film and increases its lifetime.

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Right now, I’m currently 35,000 feet traveling 580mph over the Sea of Okhotsk. I’m on my way to Tokyo for a layover to Hong Kong. I’ve been sitting on this plane for more than 10 hours, and we’ve still got about 3 more to go before we get to Japan. I just happened to take out my laptop and saw that there was the Boeing Connexion wireless internet available for free. Pretty sweet. Just gave out hot towels. Now, it’s breakfast time…even though it’s really 10:45pm. Here’s a photo I just took collecting the hot towels.