Fotopalooza

I've been out and about taking pictures in Newark, Hamilton, and Trenton this past week, and it will take a while for me to review and fix the better pix in my graffics program, and discard those that don't work. I took advantage of both days of Bank of America's "Museums on Us" program, going to Aljira here in Newark on Saturday and Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton on Sunday. I also took some fotos at home, along the way home on Saturday, and in Trenton after I left nearby Hamilton Township on Sunday. Sunday's total was 261 fotos; Saturday's, 59. And in the prior workweek, that started August 31st, I took an additional 112 fotos, for a grand total this past week of 432 pix to fix. I must be stopped!

Until I can fix all those pix, and decide whether to backfill what is now two missing days' entries, for Saturday and Sunday, I can put up some pix that update earlier discussions. This first foto shows the complete athletic mural on the side of the Fleisher Athletic Center on the NJIT campus. I showed a foto last Monday that was truncated left and rite. On Saturday I got out of the car and found that simply moving backward wouldn't let me produce a foto of the entire wall, because buildings and trees were in the way. So I had to walk sideways away from the wall.

The second foto shows that the plantings below the mural, which appear from the front to be shallow, are actually deep. This next foto shows a path at the west end of the Fleisher Center. The banners speak to 125 years of NJIT.

NJIT was founded in 1881 as the Newark Technical School. Sponsored by the city of Newark with a matching grant from the New Jersey state legislature, it offered non-degree training in "Science, Mathematics, and Drawing." Eighty-eight Newark residents made up its first class.

That shows how much I know. I thought NJIT's only predecessor institution/name was "Newark College of Engineering", which is how it was known when I was in high school. The banners are, apparently, out-of-date, and should now say 128 years.
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While I was walking in that area, I saw a green field I hadn't noticed from the car because it is partially blocked by bleachers. It's a soccer field. You may not be able to see it at this resolution, but there's a soccer ball falling toward the woman (girl) on the rite that was kicked very high by the man (boy) on the left.

Does NJIT also have an AMERICAN football field? Well, let's see. Here's a map of the campus, that stands in that vicinity. I zoomed in on it within my graffics program but did not see any football field. Does NJIT share a football field with another college?

The soccer field is clean and well maintained, in part because the rules are made plain. The English on this sign is a bit iffy in one area and downrite wrong in another.

As I was taking pix, a charter bus arrived, and the NYU soccer team walked onto the field, presumably for a match later that day, tho it was already late afternoon by then. Does NJIT play nite soccer games? There are, as you can see, lite towers around the field. Ah, well. At least many of the NYU boys were adorable, and some brought that rarest of commodities in Newark — blond hair — to this (figuratively) fair city.

I detest soccer (and its preposterous spelling, which should be pronounced sók.ser), so would take pix of a soccer game only to show people who like it, what is going on in Newark soccer. I didn't know how long it would be before the NYU-NJIT match would start, so didn't wait around. Besides, did I mention that I hate soccer? — a stupid game played mostly in stupid countries. Soccer forbids the use of the features that most account for the rise in human intelligence and our ability to manipulate the environment: our arms and hands. Wave after wave of immigrants from countries in which soccer is a fanatical passion have gradually infected even the U.S. with an attenuated soccer bug. The full-strength illness has been responsible for many, many deaths in soccer riots, hooliganism, even cold-blooded murder in countries around the world. If there's one thing the United States generally and Newark in particular do not need, it is another source of violence.
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I'd like to see soccer eliminated from the United States, but the Government has been doing just the opposite, pushing soccer at us, since at least the 1950s. I don't know why. We had two weeks or so of that silly game in phys-ed every fall, and I for one never did learn the rules. Most of us just ended up getting kicked in the shins. What fun. We couldn't wait until soccer was over and touch football began. ("Couldn't wait" is an odd expression, no? We actually did have to wait.)
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Once I'd left NJIT, I drove past the glass-fronted portion of Newark Tech down Wickliff(e) Street. (The Official City map shows "Wickliffe" both on the map and in the street index. But the street signs show no final-E. Who is wrong?)

As I got to the end of the first block, I saw that the original Newark Tech building is adjacent to and around the corner from the new one. I had not appreciated how far north West Market Street goes; or is it how far south NJIT falls? I parked diagonally opposite the corner around which the two buildings adjoin and tried to get the two buildings in one foto but couldn't, because my camera's sole lens is not wide-angle.

I could get the glass-fronted Wickliffe Street building jutting out from the left side of the West Market Street building OR the whole front of the West Market Street building, but not both.

The architects of the new building decided not to try to match the old building but to create a striking juxtaposition of glass and masonry. I think it works, at least from this angle.

I decided to try to create a panorama. I fotograffed the left side first, then tried to hold the camera at the same vertical level and move it slitely to the rite. (I have decided, by the way, to ignore the homonym "rite", as in religious ceremony, because of Rite Aid and, more persuasively somehow, ShopRite.) Today, after I'd fixed both fotos, I read the instructions in my graffics program's Help screen for stitching pix together. You create a workspace large enuf for the two (or however many) pix and put each on a different layer. You make the layer on top partially transparent so you can line it up on the solid foto below. Once they are as closely aligned as they can be, you make the top one opaque again.
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So I did that. Unfortunately, the camera saw the scene slitely differently in the two pix, and when I followed the prescribed procedure, the two images did not mesh quite rite, and the colors differed. The camera was handheld rather than on a tripod. I will have to try this with a tripod someday. The best I could do in stitching the two pix together is this, with the rite-side foto placed over the left-side.

I then thought of putting the left side on top of the rite side, whereupon I found that I hadn't thought about traffic when I was taking these pictures. The result is that an SUV and the front of a car and bus from the left foto do not appear in the rite foto. I show the comical result as a caution to other fotografers taking pix to be assembled later into a panorama.

I was starting to enjoy playing with this process, so decided to try to add a third picture to give a wider panorama of the two Newark Tech buildings and a handsome Essex County College parking structure to the rite.

Unfortunately, I hadn't taken the third picture with a mind to merging it with the others, and it was a closer view. So I shrank it to 70% of its original size, which happened to approximate the size of the buildings in the other views. But there ended up being a white area of the workspace not filled by the sky. I couldn't crop that out because the left side of the montage is higher than the bottom of the white space. I could falsify the picture to put some blue into the missing sky, but since the colors of the different parts of the montage are different anyway, there's no point. The foto combo works as a montage to give you a sense of the place, even if the colors and other particulars are off.

Next time I want to create a panorama, I'll use my tripod (which was in the trunk of my car not far away, since the lite was so brite I didn't feel the need to steady the camera; I hadn't anticipated trying to create any panoramas) and take the pictures quickly, while traffic and liting conditions are the same, and clouds, if any, haven't had time to move. Live and learn.

I like the many banners that now grace myriad lite stanchions and public buildings Downtown. Multiple identical banners, such as the 125-year banners at NJIT and these ECC banners, unify a view and add a certain dignified meter to the urban landscape.

I also took some pix of the new park that runs along Wickliff(e) Street from opposite Newark Tech on West Market to South Orange Avenue, but that's a topic for another day.