Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

Steve Jobs (L) and Steve Wozniak in 1977. Probably the only photo of Jobs in a necktie.

Steve Wozniak in 1977 announcing the Apple II

I’m amused that the Woz is going to appear on Dancing with the Stars.  Here are some pictures of him and Steve Jobs I took in 1977, the day that they announced the Apple II at the First West Coast Computer Faire.  The Woz is pretty much the geek’s geek, and has a great sense of humor.  But somehow, I just don’t see him as a great dancer.  Guess we’ll just have to see how he does.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he tries to automate his dance partner’s dress or something like that.

I spent about an hour and a half with Steve Jobs that day, talking about how he was going to compete with IBM and other amazingly grandiose things.  I went back up to Cupertino a few weeks later, but when I saw houses selling for $70,000, I decided going to work for them was out of the question (they had about 12 people in the company at the time).

These images and others are available for commercial licensing through Getty Images.

False Kiva in Canyonlands National Park

I just got some photos that I ordered from Wally Pacholka, an astro photographer who produces the most evocative images of the universe that I’ve ever seen.  Always including a terrestrial foreground, he manages to bring out the night sky against an intriguing foreground that connects our earth-bound vision with a love of the universe.  This image is a real photo, not a kluged-together photoshop project.

I’ve tried to shoot images like this, but somehow, it just doesn’t look the same.  Great work, Wally.

Thanks to a tip from Charles Smith a while back, I’ve discovered the Gigapan.org site, that helps folks post very large scale mosaics. It’s a fascinating process, and opens up a whole new way of doing photography. It also seems to be contagious. Three friends have seen my panos and have now begun their own exploration.

Above is a mosaic I took of the Copper Canyon in Northern Mexico last month. I shot 21 handheld individual photos, then stitched them together with Photoshop CS3. (using the Photomerge feature with both auto align and autoblend options turned on.)

I then saved the image as a TIFF, and uploaded it to Gigapan. Gigapan allows users to pan and zoom through the image, as well as take “snapshots” of the larger image.

This can take up a tremendous amount of compute time and memory. A 1 gb image can chew up 10gb of disk space while Photoshop is doing its magic.

Here are all of my panoramas