Caprices of the Atmosphere

There was no real winter in the Upper Rhine Valley this year, but exactly on the spring equinox the weather turned cold and it started snowing until Sunday noon - something like a bad joke from the atmosphere.

Kaiserstuhl is the warmest region of Germany where snow is a rare event. The Pasque Flowers should be blossoming there around the equinox and the cherries not much later.

I chose this place because it has multiple relations to the atmosphere, but when I reached there I saw that it had even some more:

• Atmos is greek for mist, and there was a lot of mist this evening.

• The sunset together with the remaining snow created a special atmosphere.

• The location is pretty exposed to the sky.

• The Kaiserstuhl is an ancient volcano. The source of our atmosphere was exhaled by volcanoes.

• The soil there is very fertile because it consists mainly of loess - dust created by the ice age glaciers, which was transported and deposited by the wind.

...atmosphere anywhere. In fact we are children of the atmosphere and if one looks closer even things that at a first glance have nothing to do with the atmosphere are somehow related.

---

Europe / Germany

Lat: 48° 5' 37" N
Long: 7° 41' 45" E

Elevation: 521m (+29m above ground)

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: High. Pinpoints the exact spot.

Canon EOS 600 analog film camera, Zenitar 16mm Fisheye, Fuji Reala scanned with Nikon LS40. PTGui, enblend3 and Photoshop.

If you tilt the panorama down you soon realize: Apparently there is nothing where the photographer can stand on.

Well, actually there is a tower, but unfortunately with a roof, and with conventional shooting that would have prevented the sky view which is necessary to show some atmosphere.

Hence I shot handheld 8 images around - 4 from the corners and 4 from the middle of the sides - all slightly outside the railing and all tilted down, such that the foot of the tower was just visible. Naturally this gives parallax errors of some meters...

Some additional shots well outside the railing pointing upwards helped to capture the whole sky.

The tower was reduced to a square on the floor after stitching which was erased by cloning some other parts of the floor.

Actual stitching was done twice: First for the floor parts in order to get a consistent view down. This one created large stitching errors in the horizon. The second one was stitched for the horizon and the sky. This one didn't match at all for the floor. Both where then stitched together approximately along the visible tree line.