Rubber Hits the Wood

Dreaming of Transportation, an abstract concept, I walk along the bike path beside a road. Going past the guard rail, I see damaged wood and avoid a big sliver. As I photograph the detail, I imagine the story of what happened.

A bicycler swerves to avoid an oncoming car, person, or bicycle, scraping the metal of the bicycle frame along the wood, raising a corkscrew pattern of the trauma. The accident leaves a slight trace of the effect of transportation. The car driver and bicycle rider zoom off at different speeds in different directions, oblivious of the tiny suspended life form that so narrowly missed destruction. See the cocoon in the shadows below.

The drama of transportation hangs in the air - felt, suspected, but unseen. The spinning of spokes. The hubcap of tire. The dark secret unknown cocoon. Twists of wood and fate and change. That's what it's all about. There's an old saying that the moment of truth is "where the rubber meets the road". Here rubber tires spin on road and path, causing bike to hit wood. If I got it right.

How about seeing the panorama for its own sake (as in "art for art's sake")? Spin in and out. Up and down. Fast and slow. Spend some time at each pole, spinning around the center. Each variety of interaction is a different experience. The visual experience does not have to represent something else. See if you can get into it. Be transported. Let yourself go.

This site is in Deer Lake State Park, Florida (just to the east of #8 on the map). You can see the guard railings in the panorama setting, my DLSP March 2004 WWP entry. After capturing the elements, I returned to the site and photographed a reenactment of the event. See it and related files in the links below.

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USA-Canada / USA-Florida

Lat: 30° 18' 27.2" N
Long: 87° 5' 42.19" W

Elevation: 1 m

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: Medium. Nearby, but not to the last decimal.

Visual: Canon 300D (Digital Rebel) dSLR camera, EF-S 10-22mm lens, RAW, IS0 100, 1/20 sec at f/4, focal length 17 mm for bicycle wheel. Wood and car hubcap photos similar. Photoshop CS to composite photos. PTViewer Java applet to find pan, FOV, and tilt values. MakeCubic v1.1.6 to create cubic panorama. QuickTime Pro 7.1.3 for copyright and fast start preview tracks. Platform: Macintosh computer: Dual 2.7 GHz Power PC G5.

The idea came while walking along a path. I photographed splintered wood by the road, bicycle wheel in the studio, and car wheel in a parking lot.

Assembling the photos in Photoshop, I converted the wheels from Polar to Rectangular using the Distort/Polar Coordinates filter. Stretched each wheel to the proportion 1 high x 4 wide. Placed the bicycle hub at the top of a 2 high x 4 wide equirectangular canvas. Rotated the car wheel 180 degrees and placed it at the bottom. Cropped the splintered wood to the proportion of the canvas. Blurred the seams in ImageReady, using the Other/Tile Maker filter, blending edges width 5 percent. Pasted the wood as layer over the wheels. Cut out the center strip and twist of wood to stay on top. Transparentized the remaining wood to reveal the wheels below.

Created a Java Applet panorama at http://www.wholeo.net/movies/allAround/wwpTransportation9-06applet3.htm with the source image. To get the correct values for the initial view, I panned, rolled, and zoomed to the position. Leaving the mouse over the panorama and pressing "v" on the keyboard reported the values in the status bar at the bottom of the browser window.

Used the values in making the panorama in MakeCubic. Added copyright and "Saved as" in QuickTime Pro 7.1.3.