View the panorama in immersive mode  ›  2,523 kbytes (2.46 Mbytes)

With all the floodlights turned off at the main buildings of the city it
resulted in a very soft scene to the capital of my country. I chose this
very place to shoot because I wanted to take a long-exposure picture
of our world-famous parliament and the lights turned off gave me a
chance to get some ships of long exposure on the Danube without
overexposing the building.

As you can see they only turned off the exterior floodlights at the
parliament. It was the same with the bridges: the street-lightnings
were left on not to disturb the traffic. However in the Buda Castle
everything was turned off as they organized a torch festival.

I added some small thumbnails of the most famous buildings of Budapest
for easier to recognize, you can find these at the bottom of the panorama.
Enjoy the lights!

View Larger Map

View the panorama in immersive mode  ›  660 kbytes (0.64 Mbytes)

…until yesterday when I found a folder with several unstitched panorama sources. I cannot stitch it back then, as I laid in bed with high fever and bad flu. This is what you see in this picture also. I shot this panorama with the help of my girlfriend who took care of me as I was sick. I hoped that I can get better in time to stitch this, but alas the time was up for submit for the color event. So this was left unstitched until now.

And how it connects to the theme ‘color’? I only left the salt lamp in the scene lit, so it painted everything orange. And – as you can see – where no light could fall, there is no color at all. This means, color makes sense only if there’s light in the scene. Without a light source there’s no color. I often dreamed about a panorama with very low light conditions, I wanted to get a feeling of everything levitates in a black space, and only some important things get lit. This is similar to my first WWP panorama, which was shot in the same room. Back then, I didn’t have that dormer window.

So, get ready for some old stuff, which comes in the next days/weeks!

View Larger Map

View the panorama in immersive mode  ›  2,207 kbytes (2.16 Mbytes)

I – myself being a blues fan – thought about making a panorama in one of my favorite pubs here in Budapest. The place called “Nothin’ But The Blues Pub”, and it has a very bluesy atmosphere. The guests are very friendly and the beer is inexpensive. If you are hungry they also serve some sandwiches which are very delicious and of extra size at a reasonable price. If you ever visit Budapest and want to spend a great night having some beer with your friends, I would recommend this place!

View Larger Map

View the panorama in immersive mode  ›  2,424 kbytes (2.37 Mbytes)

Each year Ráday street awaits the public, that is susceptible to culture and is willing to spend its free time in a top class environment. From April to October in the course of “Ráday cult street” about eight fetsivals are organised here. From among the mentioned festivals the following are the most popular: International Poetry Festival, Plein-Art Contemporary Art Festival, Reformed Music Festival, Summer Games in Ferencváros, Ferenc Day Fair. Besides this three galleries, a Bible museum and the previously mentioned library awaits the art lovers.

No matter if we end up in Ráday street in the morning or at night, it is never deserted; there are always some people sitting at the cafés or restaurants and their terraces. Among many others it is due to the some 14 cafés that can be found here. Ráday street can be devided into two strikingly detaching parts; the boundary is Bakáts Square. The Saint Ferenc Catholic Church can also be found here. Heading towards Boráros Square from here the view is slightly less attractive; it is the other side, the one towards Kálvin Square is the actual pedestrian precinct. Most cafés are found here: the starting point is Jaffa Café, and the line of cafés ends with a retro bar called Cha-cha-cha that is found in the subway at Kálvin Square.

Because of it being much frequented the government of Ferencváros – the building of which is also situated here – is consistently working on transforming Ráday Street into a solely pedestrian precinct. Today cars can still run along the street in one direction, however the traffic is kept reduced so that the people visiting this place can have fun and relax undisturbed.

View Larger Map

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