Skeoge Road

The Skeoge Road was opened a few days before this photograph was taken.

It is a new road that connects the Foyle Bridge (built twenty five years ago) to the Buncrana Road that crosses the border into County Donegal. The local planners, the Road Service and Derry City Council have been talking about this road for almost twenty years. Finally it is open.

It will allow people travelling from County Donegal to reach the bridge without getting tangled in the Derry city traffic.

The opening of the road marks the re-zoning of the land that you see around this panorama from agricultural-use to urban-use.

Hence, as with many beginnings this is also an end. If we return to this point in five years the mountains of Inishowen will still be there on the horizon but around us the fields will have gone to be replaced by housing developments and light industry.

As the panorama opens you can just glimpse, at the spot where the road beyond the roundabout seems to fade into the distance, the hill on which stands the ancient stone fort known as "Grianan an Aileach ".

Europe / UK-Northern Ireland

Lat: 55° 2' 31.08" N
Long: 8° 20' 57.52" W

Elevation: 50m

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: Unknown / Undeclared.

Canon EOS 5D, with a Zenitar-M 16mm Fisheye f/2.8 lens, mounted on a Kaiden Kiwi panorama adapter.

Six sets of bracketed images were shot, plus a set for sky and ground. They were stitched using HugIn (version 0.7) with Enfuse invoked by Hugin to increase the dynamic range. It was rendered as a rotating Cubic-VR using CubicConvertor and CubicConector.

This panorama was the result of my recent experiments with Hugin and Enfuse. It was stitched by the latest version of Hugin (0.7_svn2978_20080331) that includes enfuse and autopano-sift-C) using exposure-bracketed images.

I pretty much followed the procedure outlined in January 2008 by Bruno Postle: http://hugin.sourceforge.net/tutorials/enfuse-360/en.shtml

The raw-materials consisted of 6 sets of horizontal images with 3 exposures in each set and a set of nadir shots and a set of zenith shots.

It was a very windy day. So windy that if I had let go of the tripod the wind would simply have blown it and the camera away.

I grabbed this shot thinking that the weather would change before the weekend and I would get something better but in the event the weather turned for the worst. So I went with this one.