View the panorama in immersive mode  ›  2,841 kbytes (2.77 Mbytes)

Orthent – a progressive rock band’s approach to the traditional Hungarian folk-song heritage

The Band:
Identification of Orthent’s musical style is not justified. It has been called progressive rock – most commonly, or culture-rock and because of its certain elements, it has also been called folk-rock or even world music. Their aim is to create a new, unusual, but widely acceptable musical atmosphere behind the traditional Hungarian folk-songs.

The band always starts working on the songs with care and respect, so that they would still deliver their messages – as they always have. By putting a new-age instrumental sound behind, they try to update the songs to the understanding of a new generation. So, it is only the music they change, the songs are sung in their authentic way.

The photo:
The photo was taken in Göd, Hungary, at the side of the River Danube (Duna – as we call it). The scenery was provided by the low tide of the river. This area is under water for more than half of the year. The water level can easily be over one and a half meters high at the point where the photo was taken.

As you can see, we were trying to create a little bit of fantasy atmosphere for the band. The “creatures” at the background are from Mohács, in southern Hungary. They are called “Busó” masks. They are worn during the carnival season to say goodbye to the cold season and welcome to spring time! The tradition originated from the sokac (Croatia) nation and they can bring good luck besides many other aspects.

At this session they were worn by the members of the band, so you can imagine the many layers used for this panorama!

Thanx for the masks: Csaba Vikár
for the smoke: Gyuszi
for the photo: vrphoto.hu!

Sára Tímár – vocals
Lóránt Both – guitar
Gábor Majoros – guitar
András Hajnal – bass
Márton Orosz – drums, percussion

Music is available on-line at http://www.orhent.hu
e-mail: orthent@orthent.hu
Here you can find more info on this busho tradition.

View Larger Map

View the panorama in immersive mode  ›  2,808 kbytes (2.74 Mbytes)

I couldn’t find an idea that would be the best place for this event. After all,
we went to a nice Bavarian pub and restaurant called ‘Bratwursthaeusl,’ and
had some beer from 1l Bavarian mugs. We ordered a ‘plate of plenty’ too:
this is a large plate full of Bavarian food sorts. At last I thought that this would
be a nice theme – after some mugs we didn’t want to go further for another one.

View Larger Map

View the panorama in immersive mode  ›  3,455 kbytes (3.37 Mbytes)

It resides in Matra, this is the highest Mountain of Hungary. We took our
tents and did a holiday camp in the nature. Finally I’ve finished my studies
at the St. Istvan University so it was also a good occasion to celebrate my
diploma in Communication Techniques Engineering. The moral was also very
elevated, at least after some Tequilas.

Anyway, this lookout tower served as an oil drill some hundred kilometres
away that place, near Szeged. (A hungarian city.) After the site was
exhausted in the late sixties the tower was brought here with large effort
to enjoy the beautiful panorama from the top of it.

View Larger Map

View the panorama in immersive mode  ›  1,789 kbytes (1.75 Mbytes)

It is a real tribute to the equinox as the ratio of day and night in the
picture is about 50-50%. It has made at the Adam Clark square in
Budapest, at the Buda side of the capital city. You can see from here
the famous Chain bridge, the Zero Kilometre Stone at the park right
from the roundabout, and the lower end of the Budapest Funicular,
leading to the Buda Castle.

Zero Kilometre Stone is a 3 m high limestone sculpture in Budapest,
forming a zero sign, and an inscription on its pedestal reading “KM”
for kilometres. This statue denotes the place from which all the highways
in Hungary are measured. The starting point was initially reckoned from
the threshold of the Buda Royal Palace, but it was taken down to the
Széchenyi Chain Bridge when it was built in 1849.

Széchenyi lánchíd or Széchenyi Chain Bridge is a suspension bridge
that spans River Danube between Buda and Pest, the west and east
side of Budapest, the capital of Hungary. The first bridge across the
Danube in Budapest, it was designed by the English engineer William
Tierney Clark in 1839, after Count István Széchenyi’s initiative in the
same year, with construction supervised locally by Scottish engineer
Adam Clark (no relation). It opened in 1849, thus became the first bridge
in the Hungarian capital. At the time, its center span of 202 m was
one of the largest in the world. The pairs of lions at each of the
abutments were added in 1852.

Among the anecdotes relating to the bridge, the most popular is that the
lions were sculpted without tongues and the sculptor was mocked so much
that he jumped into the Danube in shame. The lions do have tongues
(though not visible from below, which is the usual point of view, as the lions
are laying on a stone block some three meters high), and the sculptor lived
as long as in the 1890s, and the only message he sent to mocking people was
“Your wife should have a tongue just as my lions have, and woe will be unto you!”

View Larger Map

View the panorama in immersive mode  ›  1,957 kbytes (1.91 Mbytes)

The long awaited new cultural institution of Budapest and Hungary, the Palace of Arts, was opened in 2005. (Then palace is so newly built that it even can’t be found at googlemaps – notice the picture of the construction site below.) This was one of the most prestigious celebrations of the past hundred years in Hungary’s cultural history, since this conglomeration of cultural buildings has no precedent in 20th century Hungarian architecture. The investment took place in the form of a “Public Private Partnership”, in a co-operation between the Ministry of National Heritage and Trigránit Development Corporation. The principal contractor, Arcadom Construction Ltd and the planning Zoboki, Demeter and Partners Architectural Office, developed the institution’s programmes and details in collaboration with numerous associate planners and specialist consultants.

There are few cultural institutions in Europe that can boast the ISO quality certification (for example, the twenty year old Pompidou Centre in Paris only launched its application in 2004 before finally obtaining the ISO 9001:2000 version). In the year of its inauguration, 2005, the Palace of Arts, initiated the detailed examination process and after continuous inspection, in 2006 was awarded the latest version of the certification, the ISO 9001:2000, ahead of the Pompidou Centre.

About the making of the panorama:

On the way on the bus to the capital at around 6am

The idea of that panorama came to me about two months ago. I work at the other side of the bridge, at a newly built IT center, and walk every morning and evening across that bridge. At the evening the Palace of Arts looks very shiny and compelling, and I thought that at 7am it will be an amazing location for my wrinkle tribute panorama.

Unfortunately it had no floodlight in the morning, and the wheather was foggy too so the other lights on the other side of the Danube river couldn’t be seen too. Above all it was extremely cold too by that time (at least for wheather it used to locally), and I didn’t have any gloves with me. I could hardly managed this panorama, but it worth for it.

The position of the sun at the winter solstice

And another note: Yes, the local time at the moment the first picture was taken was 7:08am which is 06:08 UTC. It was a real challenge to wake up at 4:30am, and to wait about 15 minutes for that minute at that wheather conditions.

And why the Yin Yang (or Tai-Chi) symbol at the nadir? I searched for a nadir cap that has something to do with the solstice. It has.

View Larger Map

View the panorama in immersive mode  ›  3,304 kbytes (3.23 Mbytes)

For this event I chose a hospital, the National Medical Center (OGYIK). It’s a pity that this hospital will be closed from December this year, due to financial straits. Three more hospitals are closing too, among others the National Psychiatry and Neurology Institute (OPNI). It should be public interest, to maintain hospitals and sustain publich health. These are more than hundred years old buildings, with researchers known internationally.

I planned to take the photos at OPNI as it has a far better view, but it is under liquidation, and I wasn’t allowed to get in. Then I went to the OGYIK and wanted to take the photos between the buildings. The admittance was refused again. So I took the pictures at the front, in the street.

View Larger Map

View the panorama in immersive mode  ›  1,140 kbytes (1.11 Mbytes)

This was my first contribution here on WWP. To be honest, this pano was made in a big hurry, because I’ve forgotten the event totally. I wanted to do that in spring as well, but I missed out. Now I had only two days left, and I kept thinking about what I could photograph for the “COMMUNITY” event, as because of other work I only had a couple of dark hours the next two nights.

Then I read the Yahoo WWP Group on the second night, and the post of Bernd gave me the idea:

“hmm … another idea to the topic “community” is for example this “yahoo-community-group”!So in the panorama you see a person sitting in front of his computer where you can also see on the screen he is surfing/communicate to this yahoo-group … “

So Bernd, thank you for the nice idea!

View Larger Map

View the panorama in immersive mode  ›  1,904 kbytes (1.86 Mbytes)

The lack of field of view gives this panorama a dreamy, outerworld feel. Altough the aperture was not too wide (source pictures was made 12mm@F8.0), the lens was focused at it’s minimum distance, cca 30cm.

I had a dream 2 months before this panorama. I dreamt about a low field of view panorama, in that blooms can be seen and nothing else, the background would be blurry.

The subject gave me some difficulty, as I don’t have any special mounting device to bring the whole tripod to a top of a tree. And I didn’t want any building and other artifical things in the background. Fortunately I have found a spot just in time, before these blooms disappeared: these offshoots were all over the place with full of blossoms. The location was almost perfect, apart from the sandy soil in one direction, and the smoke at the horizon in another direction.

There was a touch of motion blur because of the wind, and some PS unsharp mask is resonsible for the dreamy effect too. As a result not always the nearest blooms are the sharpest.

It is to mention, that usually low field of view panoramas are not so immersive and therefore much like a blunder. Before this I had taken a similar low FoV panorama at a red poppy field, but that was a “half-disaster”. I think though that this panorama was a good effort, and my 40km bicycle ride with the full equipment and the tripod on my back was not purposeless.

So to speak my dream came true…

View Larger Map