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hdr panorama: fimbatal, austria

markus — Sun, 12 May 2013 17:30:56 +0000

another picture from the piz val gronda excursion in 2011:

the hdr panorama shows part of the fimba valley (fimbatal) at the swiss-austrian border.
the rugged landscape on the right is the result of tectonic windows, where marble columns “poke through” the eroding slate.

the things we do to our feet [lytro]

markus — Fri, 10 May 2013 20:15:28 +0000

what fascinates me most about rock climbing, is that i learned to use parts of my body for the activities they weren’t originally made for (or were made for, depending on how far you look back). for example, squeeze two neighbouring fingers into a small crack in the middle of a rock face, twist your hand slightly, and see how these two fingers can support your entire body’s weight without problems! (disclaimer: try at your own risk!)

here are some lytro living pictures from a recent visit to tivoli kletterzentrum, innsbruck.
as always, click to refocus, click&drag to shift perspective.

(view living picture on lytro.com)

more here: lytro album: the things we do to our feet…

australia flashback: blue water hole, cape tribulation

markus — Wed, 08 May 2013 18:00:38 +0000

working in the tropical rainforest of far north queensland doesn’t just mean you have an insane variety of tropical fruit available at your fingertips. it also means you can pop out for a swim in one of countless water holes, every now and then.

pictured: the aptly named “blue water hole”, surrounded by lush rainforest, and almost always crocodile-free.

captivate: custom picasa button to fix image captions for facebook, wordpress and others

markus — Mon, 06 May 2013 17:00:14 +0000

if you’re using picasa to organize your photos, and upload them to your wordpress blog, facebook and/or google+, you’ve probably noticed that sometimes the picasa caption doesn’t show up on the web.
the reason for this is apparently a number of metadata fields (e.g. caption, description, and title fields in either EXIF, IPTC or XMP metadata) that are used differently depending on the software you use.

to solve this problem, i’ve created a custom picasa button that will copy your picasa caption (caption-abstract) to the relevant XMPC:title field that is used (amongst others) in wordpress as the attachment title. the most important line of code is the following exiftool command:

exiftool.exe -overwrite_original -"xmp:description>xmp:title" *.jpg

disclaimer: script and button were successfully tested with picasa 3.9.0 and exiftool 9.03 in windows 7, but i cannot take responsibility for data loss. you should apply this only to copies of the original files, and always keep backups!

how to install:

save this file and export contents to C:\Tools\PicasaScripts\
get the latest exiftool windows executable and save it to the same directory. if necessary, rename the file to exiftool.exe (i.e. remove “(-k)” from the filename).
install picasa button

when the picasa configure buttons screen appears, highlight the buttons “Captivate All” and “Captivate One” and click “Add”. they will be placed next to the email, print, export buttons near the bottom of your picasa window:

now, you can batch-process either (1) all the files in the active directory (Captivate All), or (2) update just individually selected files (Captivate One), by clicking the respective button.

known issues: wordpress seems to avoid using very long attachment titles. if the image caption exceeds 80 characters, it will paste the filename into the title field and add the full XMPC:title as the description.

the batch file code is a modification based on picasastarter’s ExportCaptions button, and information from the picasa button api page.

photospheres from australia: tropical rainforest, blue mountains rock climbing

markus — Sat, 04 May 2013 07:00:42 +0000

since google now allows embedding of photospheres, i thought i’d share three more that i posted on g+ while in australia:

tropical rainforest at mossman gorge, far north queensland:

rock climbing in the blue mountains, new south wales (1):

rock climbing in the blue mountains, new south wales (2):

how to embed google+ photospheres in your wordpress blog using shortcodes

markus — Sat, 04 May 2013 01:15:36 +0000

if you’ve been following the feature additions to android over the past few months, you’ve probably heard of photospheres: they’re google streetview-like interactive 360 degree panoramas that you can easily record with your smartphone running android jellybean 4.2+.
now, google has finally provided us with a way to embed photo spheres from google+ on other websites, including your self-hosted wordpress blog!

stunning views from seegrube, innsbruck

here’s a little function for your wordpress theme’s functions.php, which will enable the shortcodes [photosphere URL] and [ps URL]:

//g+ photosphere embed add_filter('the_content', 'gplusphotosphere'); function gplusphotosphere($content) { $content = preg_replace('#(?<=[^=\"\'])\[photosphere https(.*)\]#','

',$content);

	$content = preg_replace('#(?<=[^=\"\'])\[ps https(.*)\]#','  
',$content);

	return $content;

}

copy&paste this to the end of your functions.php, and the following example:

[ps https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-CJKsUPt-aKo/UWrB_g8gU-I/AAAAAAAAEBs/R3d4-M0N2Gc/w718-h248/2013+-+1]

will turn into the interactive photosphere at the top of this article.

how to find the URL of your photosphere image:

This is the base URL of the photo sphere image you uploaded to Google+ or PicasaWeb. You can get this URL by going to the photo sphere viewer in Google+, switching to the flat viewing mode by clicking the icon in the top-right of the viewer, and then right-clicking on the photo sphere to see the image’s URL.

parameters to be modified for your personal pleasure are at the bottom of the script (for details, see link below):
fullsize="4096,2048" croppedsize="4096,1380" offset="0,480" displaysize="550,400" autorotate="1"

update: please note that while this code should generate a working photosphere embed, correct fullsize, croppedsize and offset are apparently needed. you can get these values manually (see “retrieving the photo sphere metadata”). when there’s some extra time, i’ll update the above function to accept these parameters in the shortcode.

also, google has provided a working example that will enable you to find all of your photospheres shared to date (try “get all”).

australia flashback: wattamolla cliff dive

markus — Wed, 01 May 2013 15:00:42 +0000

i’m not usually somebody who jumps off big things. at least not without a rope or chute.

here’s a picture of my first ever dive from a height of more than 1 meter, at wattamolla beach, royal national park, australia.
because the tide was low-ish, the water level was almost exactly 10 meters below.

a common characteristic of australians and tyroleans seems to be that they enjoy ignoring official barriers if they’re “in the way”. there was a special fence and several “jumping off cliffs prohibited” signs, but the rock was basically dripping with people at times.