Today I took some pictures of Athens from Mt. Penteli just before sunset.
The angle is more or less southwest. I used Auto Exposure Bracketing (±2 f-stops) and then prepared some HDR images. The one I thought was visually the best I downsampled to 2Mpixels and uploaded it here.
I also made a panorama of Athens, from the same location, using the excellent free Autostitch demo program that’s sadly only available for Windows. The University of British Columbia has licensed the autostitch algorithms to several companies. One of them Kekus Digital makes a Mac OS X program called Calico that uses the Autostitch engine. I downloaded and gave Calico a try. Sadly, I found it to be as basic as the free Autostitch demo utility for windows which you can download and use from Autostitch’s page. While there are some additional features such as TIFF support, for the time being I don’t think Calico is worth its money. Hopefully the developers will add more features and make it a worthwhile purchase. Until then, Autostitch on Windows should be enough for casual, occasional use.
I set the panorama size to approximately 16000×3000 pixels. At this resolution you can discern large well known buildings such as the OTE headquarters, the Olympic Stadium, the controversial ‘Mall’ shopping mall, other large commercial buildings and perhaps your house (if you’re lucky and eagle eyed). Right-click on the thumbnail below and download the linked image.
A word of warning: This is a huge JPG file even for modern displays/computers and some viewer programs may not be designed to cope with such high resolution files. Also, note that this is a 6.5MB file so those of you still stuck with 20th century connections may want to think twice before downloading.
Lo and behold, the cement jungle called Athens stretches before you!