the page of
Tom Lechner
bids you view his
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New Things
¡RSS!I really intend to put something new on my website every
Here are some goofy food photos that I've made recently.. 
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And here are a bunch of photos from the Pdxstrobist meetup at the Department of Skateboarding on June 25, 2008.
What I learned: I cannot fire my flashes in my D300's 5 or 6fps continuous shooting mode with skyports and definitely not with Nikon AWL!
Action shots have rapidly changing focus areas which my D300 still has trouble keeping up with, especially when using off camera flash, making me miss shots!
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12 June 2008
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Salmon Street Fountain I've been really lazy about putting content right on this site, instead going the easy route and posting on Flickr, but anyway, here's the famed Salmon Street Fountain during the Portland Rose Festival. The fountain has jets like this for a while then changes to a different water pattern coming from different jets. A source of great revelry on hot days in Portland. You can see the Hawthorne Bridge, and also in the distance to the left is Mt. Hood. Click for quicktime, and if that doesn't work for you, you can view immersively with fieldofview.com shockwave. Also, you can visit this image on flickr, or see an alternate projection of this image here.  |
Fame and Glory I can hardly believe it, but the image of mine below has been viewed over 160,000 times in 3 days!!! 
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25 May 2008
Panorama Projections
Recently I finally got around to implementing a panorama projector that can project onto any flat-faced polyhedron. Before, all my panoramas were welded to a 30-sided rhombic triacontahedron, but now the field is much wider. The unwrapping mechanism in the projector I'll be integrating into my Laidout software. On Flickr, there's been a flare up up panorama projecting onto polyhedra. You can see my projections here. Some others doing very interesting similar things are Seb Perez-Duarte, and David Swart.
4 May 2008
Busy, busy, busy!
The last few weeks have pulled me in all kinds of different directions, so I've been a little lazy with updating this page. I did take lots of photos, so you can click below to see some shots from a Pdx Strobist meet-up, where I took my first ever glam shots (I just have mixed feelings about that), a parkour clinic in northern Washington, then the Stumptown Comics Fest. Then, of course, there's lots of various side projects in addition to my full time day job. I took panoramic photos of all these events, but it'll take me a little while to catch up!
8 April 2008
I've now basically recovered from the 24 Hour Comics Drawpocalypse at the Cosmic Monkey. Something like 25 or so people started at 10am Saturday, and about 15(?) were left alive the next day. Some had finished their 24 page comic many hours early and left!! Lots of great work was made. I finished with 2 hours to spare. Click the images below to see my comic. You can also see my first 24 hour comic here.
and so on...
29 March 2008
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24 Hour Comics Drawpocalypse Yes, it's time again for a 24 hour comics masochism marathon!! The task is to create a (finished) 24 page comic in 24 hours. I did one in 2005, and it's time to see if I can still stay up 24 hours straight, and live to tell the tale. See a promo staring 24 hour superstar David Chelsea here. This will be at the Cosmic Monkey this Saturday, April 5, 10am to 10am Sunday. Be there or be asleep!! 
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At Lick Observatory Nestled atop Mt. Hamilton just east of San Jose, Lick Observatory, which has nothing to do with tongues, is home to several telescopes, including this gigantic refractor. This is one of the neatest interiors I've seen in a while. Visited last Decemeber, but hadn't been there since I was a kid, and it's still neat! There's a very windy road leading up to it, and I have childhood memories of trying to spot the wrecked cars that had driven off to their doom whenever we drove up. This photo is of the first telescope built on the site, which was constructed between 1876 and 1887. The body of James Lick lays entombed beneath. Beat that for ambiance!! The entire floor that you see raises and lowers so that the eyepiece of the telescope can be at eye level for the astronomers. You can see the counterweights along the walls. The telescope itself is balanced so that a single person can just grab hold of it and drag it around to point it at the right place. All in all, a neat place to visit. If this quicktime doesn't work for you, you can view interactively with shockwave. Also, you can visit this image on flickr, or see an alternate projection of this image here. 
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15 March 2008
Iraq Body Count Panorama
This was an installation at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, March 2008, done by iraqbodycountexhibit.org. You can just make out a thin strip of red flags in the distance. A sign nearby reads: "Each white flag represents at least 5 Iraqis, Each red flag represents 5 Americans killed as a result of the 2003 invasion of Iraq."
As of March, 2008, iraqbodycount.org estimates about 85,000 civilians have died from violence in Iraq since 2003.
Click the image for interactive quicktime, or you can view interactively with shockwave.
You can also visit this image on flickr.
11 March 2008
The Quiet Before the Storm
What a way to go!
My second go at an enfused panorama. Much more ghosting that my first attempt, but pretty easy to clean up. If you don't have quicktime, you can try to view interactively with shockwave.
7 March 2008
Gimp Tricks
So I finally got a feature accepted in the mainline Gimp that allows you to temporarily see through sections of an image as you try to rotate, scale, shear or otherwise transform. This has long been one of my main irritations whenever I use an unmodified Gimp to edit images. You too can use this if you use the subversion development version of the Gimp, or you can use my patch for Gimp 2.4.5. Many thanks to the Gimp developers for accepting this feature.
3 March 2008
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24 Hour Comics Jam Panorama This was one of many such events hosted at illustrator and graphic novelist David Chelsea's place, in July of 2006, in the spirit of of 24 Hour Comics day, where cartoonists have 24 consecutive hours to create a finished 24 page comic. I've managed to get one done on time, not this time around, but the previous year. At this jam, I opted to chicken out and just take photos. Surprisingly enough, some of these comics even turn out pretty good! Photographed with 30 photos from this thing. Click image to view interactively with quicktime, or you can try to view with a shockwave viewer. 
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Your Chance to Harass Tom at the Stumptown Comics Fest I will once again have a table full of stuff at this year's Stumptown Comics Fest. It's happening many months earlier this year all of a sudden, and I hope to have at least one new book, as well as funky new photo balls. I might be able to pull that off, if I get properly "busy"! 
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2 March 2008
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Get Your Walnuts Here This is another of my older panoramas from 2006 made with 30 photos taken with this thing. The tree is a huge black walnut tree near Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon. This kind of tree is great to have near curbs, because the huge walnuts that drop off the branches will often make a memorable resonant thump on unsuspecting cars and passers by. 
Click image to view with quicktime or view with shockwave. |
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Added some more really old cartoons to really old cartoon gallery Lately, I've been screwing around with my new camera and fisheye lens instead of drawing cartoons, so I thought I'd post some more of my oldest cartoons to my old cartoon gallery. 
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1 March 2008
Stone Steps Near the Portland Rose Gardens
This is the very first spherical panorama I ever made, stitched together from 30 photos in June of 2006. I finally managed to convert it to a computer viewable format. It shows neat stone steps leading up to the Rose Gardens in Washington Park, Portland, Oregon.
You can view with quicktime or with shockwave.
27 February 2008
Eagle Creek, and Flickr
So rather than implementing comments on my own website, I'm at the moment opting for Flickr.com. So now you can go over there and flame my photos in comments! Probably I'll keep most of my cartoons on this site, and just dump my photos there (as well as here). If you don't want to sign up with Flickr, you can of course still email me.
Anyway, here's a panorama in which we see the shadow of the Creature of the Punch Bowl, shortly before it mauled my leg. With the assistance of Adam and Mike, I managed to escape, and you can see my empty shoes left as a reminder to others.
In any case, this is one of my older panoramas that I converted to be computer viewable.
25 February 2008
More First Thursday Panoramas
Behold the Pony Club, one of the Everett Lofts in downtown Portland. That place shows strange comic art, and sells various odd comics, including some of my books sometimes. The shot on the right shows a large drawing by Theo Ellsworth protecting the crackers from Dylan.
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click to view panorama (456kb) |
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24 February 2008
Just another working day
I was on my way to work the other day, and on the Hawthorne Bridge, the sunrise really struck me. So anyway, at the end of the day, even with my brain scrambled from the day's events, I happened to notice a really striking sunset! These photos really don't do the sky justice.
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click to view panorama (358kb) |
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20 February 2008
Bush Blows Up Moon, Protests Follow
President Bush today decided to blow up a falling spy satellite, but missed by about 60,000 miles, and hit the moon instead! It turned completely red for a while, but suffered no permanent effects. He told reporters that, "Well dangit, the moon is just an easier target to aquire that some puny little space junk!" But seriously, owing to a freak atmospheric phenomenon, the moon in the photo appears to be much larger than it actually is. To the right and up a little from the Hawthorne Bridge, you can just barely make out the Orion constellation amidst all the jpeg compression clutter.
I have some other eclipse photos which I'll post later. If you like them, you should tell me!
click to view panorama (396kb)
18 February 2008
Foggy Morning on the Willamette
This photo was taken one foggy morning just after the first big storm of winter, December 2007 in Portland. When I try to view this photo with Freepv on Linux, for some reason the top photo is 1/3 smaller than it should be, and tiled 3 times, leaving a huge black rectangle floating in the sky, and I have no idea why. Seems to work for real quicktime on other machines, though.
click to view panorama (360kb)
14 February 2008
Parkour in the Park
Some of the first Portland parkour for 2008. Present were Julian, Tim 1, Tim 2, Monkeyjunta, Oni, Adam, and me, hiding behind the camera. This could have been a fairly good panorama, but I forgot to take enough photos of the reeeally long shadows that day, and of the people after they landed. The shadows I drew in are just silly, but I'm tired of working on it!! I do like the trees, though.
click to view panorama (643kb)
9 February 2008
At the table with the Friends of the Nib
For First Thursday at Floating World Comics in Portland, Oregon this month, Jim Woodring and the Friends of the Nib came down from Seattle to sit around and draw cartoons. I happened to be passing, and took this panorama hand-held..
click to view panorama (509kb)
2 February 2008
Inside Lick Observatory's 120 inch Reflecting Telescope Dome
Aside from the hideous moire pattern on part of the dome that I'm too lazy to process out, this panorama came together reasonably well. They also had a short video that visitors can view about how the telescope was brought up mountain on the very narrow winding roads and assembled in the dome.
click to view panorama (411kb)
26 January 2008
Panorama of My Grandma's Backyard
This panorama is my first attempt at building a panorama from multiple exposures. Each section is built from two photos: one light and one darker, which are blended together using Enfuse. There are various other ways to combine exposures, but enfuse is fast, easy, and has adequate results (so far!). I also have to keep reminding myself to make sure I focus on the right area!! My final photos straight down focused on the tripod rather than on the ground. GRRrrr!
click to view panorama (508kb)
20 January 2008
Portland MAX station in the depths of the night
So this is what a MAX stop looked like at 4am just after the winter solstice of 2007, while I was waiting for the train to take me to the airport. Also new is that I totally reprogrammed my sphere photos page, so that it has a much slicker interface..
click to view panorama (244kb)
15 January 2008
Another observatory on Mt. Hamilton
Here's a qtvr of the dome containing the 120 inch reflecting telescope of Lick Observatory at sunset.
click to view panorama (411kb)
6 January 2008
Presents, and the World Wide Panorama
I now have 2 panoramas in the World Wide Panorama, a great repository of thousands of total panoramas, from across the globe. One of mine is my parkour panorama and the other one is a room full of presents.
There is also another parkour panorama, by Gerardo Sanchez which is better!
click to view panorama page
4 January 2008
Lick Observatory
During my winter travels, I took this picture of Lick Observatory on top of Mt. Hamilton in California, overlooking the haze covered Silicon Valley. I made 4 panoramas up there, the rest of which I'll post some other day!
click to view panorama (645kb)
10 December 2007
Continuous Parkour
Here's the so called droste effect, made with the mathmap plugin for the Gimp. You might also be interested in this Escher print. I realize it's a littel choppy. I'm working on it..
1 December 2007
Parkour Sphere
Here's another spherical panorama, this time of parkour at Keller Fountain in Portland, Oregon.
 
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click to view panorama (300kb)
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24 November 2007
Marquam Bridge Spherical Panorama
I've managed to figure out how to use Hugin to stitch together photos I've taken with my new fisheye lens. Yes, you can just go look at the scene below in Google Streetview, but mine has more color to it. Below left is the resulting quicktime-vr file, and below right is the whole panorama. It's not perfect, but it'll have to do for a first try. I'm still trying to figure out how to correct for the chromatic aberration of the fisheye.
If, like me, you are running linux, you might have to use freepv, to view the quicktime-vr, since quicktime on linux cannot properly handle qtvr files, as far as I'm aware.
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15 November 2007
Ho hum..
Ok, so I've been a bit slack with the updating again. I know it's a cop-out,
but here are some links to other people's work that I've found pretty neat:
Carel Struycken, who played Lurch in the modern Addams Family movies, happens to make very nice spherical panoramas:
www.sphericalpanoramas.com
Here's a site with over 3000 spherical panoramas that anyone can download and look at. If you are running linux, you might have extra problems, as they are all in Quicktime VR format, not particularly well supported in linux, but if you can get it to compile, you can use freepv. If you are using debian, you might have problems getting the web browser plugin to work, since it wants Firefox or Mozilla related dev files, and there don't seem to be equivalent Iceweasel dev files, unless I'm missing something...
geoimages.berkeley.edu/worldwidepanorama/wwp/index.html
Lastly, here's some info about an autistic man by the name of Stephen Wiltshire who, after flying over Rome in a helicopter ONCE, spent 3 days drawing an extremely accurate 10 meter panorama of Rome:
www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk
www.break.com/index/autistic-man-draws-near-perfect-panorama=of-rome.html
22 September 2007
Fame and Glory
Holy crap, one of my Laidout tutorials has been viewed over 1000 times since I posted it last week!! The other ones are more like a couple views a week, but that one, OVER 1000!!!! What the hell? There can't possibly be that many people interested in a tutorial for software that probably only I use?! Instead of posting actual content to my site this week, I am simply going to sit back a bathe in the glory. Oh, and next weekend I will have a table at the Stumptown Comics Fest. It will be Saturday and Sunday, the 29th and 30th at the Lloyd Center Doubletree, 1000 NE Multnomah St. in Portland, Oregon. See you there!
15 September 2007
Laidout Version 0.08
I've been a little lazy with the cartooning again, and for similar reasons: Version 0.08 of Laidout is now released. New is a paper tiling interface so that you can take some collage of images, for instance, and print it out spread across several pieces of paper, so you can make large posters with a little inkjet. Here's a tutorial about that, using an image I threw together of Pluto, God of the Underworld, responding to being demoted to a mere dwarf planet:
17 August 2007
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Comic of the Moment I finally finished inking Seaside Retreat, which ended up being 16 pages long instead of 14 pages. It is now available in print form in Tales of Inertia, Number 1, which also contains the first 11 pages of Weak Daze. 
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EventsIn other news, the Portland Zine Symposium has come and gone, met lots of odd people, sold some books, and people actually showed up to my workshop on Open Source Software for Zine Making. Fewer people came to it as compared to last year, but fewer people left during the middle of it too, and I'll take that as an improvement overall. Having a projector to demonstrate things was very handy. |
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