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Earth Hour 2011

Viktor Balogh — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 15:56:22 +0000

This year the worldwide “Earth Hour” event gave me a hint what to
shoot for the Limits equinox. They say that we are slowly beyond the
limits of our mother earth’s resources.

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

We consume so much energy that our earth cannot reproduce it. So
let’s just give a break to the nature for at least an hour, and turn off
all the lights for 60 minutes.

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!

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Raday renovation pt. III.

Viktor Balogh — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 18:45:53 +0000

By the ninth week, the windows were already there, the door to the bathroom was also installed, and the slab of the bathroom is finished. Down under you can see the frame of the stairway half-way readied. The bedroom will be separated from the hall by glass bricks. The whole flat was designed entirely by my girlfriend, she also coordinates the construction and the procurement.

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Raday renovation pt. II.

Viktor Balogh — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 17:01:27 +0000

This is the very first panorama made at the newly established gallery. This is only the framing, it will be covered with MDF boards and parquet.

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WWP Elevation – Camping at the lookout tower of Sástó

Viktor Balogh — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 16:59:40 +0000

For this event I chose one of my favourite lookout tower.

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.

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WWP Beginning – Day and night

Viktor Balogh — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:00:38 +0000

This panorama is made of two separate panoramas: one shot at daylight
and one in the night. It depicts the beginning of night by showing day and night
elements such as cars and pedestrians at daylight, citylights and stripes
made by car headlights at night.

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!”

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Lookout from the third floor

Viktor Balogh — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 11:14:05 +0000

This panorama was made from the window at the third floor.

View the panorama in immersive mode › 1,933 kbytes (1.89 Mbytes)

When you look downwards you can see the parking lot dedicated
directly to the higher staff of the unversity, such as dean, etc…

Behind the cars there is a large green park with a statue of prince Kalman on a horse.
Coloman I. the Book-lover (Hungarian: I. (Könyves) Kálmán), also spelled Koloman (c. 1070 – 3 February 1116),
was the king of Hungary (1095-1116) and of Croatia (1102-1116).

Anyway, this picture was made with the help of enfuse. There were
3 separate exposures and all those were fused together.
However, the ceiling and the bottom parts were not too perfect due to
that enfuse handles the zenith and nadir (upper and lower) parts not yet properly,
it is only in an alpha state.

“If contrasty structures are near zenith or nadir in an equirectangular image, there might be an artifact (vortex) in the resulting pano. Workaround: use on zenith and nadir images separately and stitch them in the resulting pano afterwards.”
http://wiki.panotools.org/Enfuse

So I was given with a large neon-greenish artifact, and I needed to PS it away.
But the retouch was not perfect, you can see me with the tripod becoming sweaty
in the glass. It was too hot in the window because of the reflections.

By the way, the sitting student is my colleague and good friend, Daniel Kadar.
He helped me carrying all the photo accessories during the photoshoot of the University.

Thank you again, Daniel!

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