The Best Of The Murphy Law's Worst of 2006

This scene depicts part of San Jose Downtown on South Market Street during the 2006's Christmas season. In this scene, you can see the San Jose Museum of Art, the former Knight Ridder Headquarter, the San Jose Fairmont Hotel, and the San Jose Historical Main Post Office. You also see two winter events going on: the San Jose Downtown Ice Skating under the palm trees in the courtyard square and Christmas in the Park across the street (behind the colorful sculpture of Figure Holding the Sun by Italo Scanga). Look for the hot spots.

According to Murphy's Law, if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. For me, tonight things went wrong at the wrong time and at the wrong place. This panorama took unusually long to shoot because of this Murphy Law's situation. Read more details at at the below hyperlink 'Behind the scene'.

The stitched VR pano turns out to be better than I expected under this YING situation, and the YANG side of the Murphy Law also oppositely works that when the worst hits the bottom, the best will bounce back.

Wishing everyone A Happy Holiday and A Prosperous New Year 2007. Thanks for looking.

USA-Canada / USA-California

Lat: 37° 20' 0.21" N
Long: 122° 54' 23.87" W

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: High. Pinpoints the exact spot.

Canon EOS 5D, saw off Nikkor 10.5mm mounted on Roundshot VR-Drive head and combo Manfrotto tripod/center column 458B/556B.

The integrated plastic hood of Nikkor 10.5mm was partially sawed off in order to get the full frame pictures with Canon 5D when I received the Nikon lens to Canon body adapter in the morning.

While I tried to adjust the aperture to f/8 or 9 by inserting a little plastic tab used for f-stop adjustments, it was dropped inside the lens that caused the focusing ring to jam and stopped at distance indicator on digit '0' of '0.3'. It could not be rotated further to either 0.5 or ∞ (infinity). I had no other choice but to panograph with the focusing setting as is for now.

Thirty minutes were spent manually adjusting and testing the lens. The VR panorama was taken with guessing f/8 and stuck focus point at 0.3 with 4 shots to cover all scene including zenith and nadir.

During this time, I attracted the attention of a roaming security guard. It was late, and he was suspicious of what I was doing behind the tall structure. I hid the camera behind the 23-feet sculpture from the bright spotlight. He became friendly after I explained what I was doing and even bragged that his girlfriend was a hobbyist of photography. I gain one or two more viewers for WWW Panorama.

By the way, prior this incident, the process of sawing off the Nikkor lens 10.5mm was made easier for me with the tips from the following tutorials:

• Sawing off the sun-shield (Nikkor 10.5 mm f/2.8 fisheye: Get back the hidden complete Angle of View) by Micheal Thoby of michel.thoby.free.fr

• Fitting a Nikkor 10.5mm Fisheye to a Canon EOS mount DSLR/SLR by Smooth of smooth360.com

• Quicktime VR (360°/180°) with 3 shots with a Nikon 10.5mm on a Canon 5D by Eric Rougier of fromparis.com

Many thanks to Michel Thoby, Smooth and Eric Rougier.