The Art of Geography is about combining art, technology, and appreciation of the natural world. Some of the byproducts of this melding are maps that help you get where you want to go, photographic panoramas that show you what it's like to be in various wilderness locations around the world, and abstract expressionist & landscape art.
Thank you to Lori Harwood and Christine Scheer for picking some Art of Geography art for the cover of their magazine, and reproducing the color/tonality so well.
Just in time for the first trillium blossoms of spring, the Forest Park map is ready for general use. This map went through several months of development and a couple months of beta testing. The current version of the map is v615 -- if you have an older version, make sure to download the latest from http://www.artofgeography.com/maps/fp/.
Pocket Virtual Worlds: "The technology, a result of a partnership between Case Western Reserve and Bowling Green, uses a mobile device to explore photograph-based virtual worlds. There's no GPS, nor Wi-Fi used, as I understand it, for the navigation of the worlds. It's not clear how the datasets are knit together. Even if I don't quite follow how it works, the New Media Consortium identified it as one of six emerging technologies in its 2008 Horizon Report. The end use?
Creating Panoramic Images in Photoshop CS3 using Auto-align Layers
The Auto-Align Layers feature is a great new feature that will make assembling your panoramic pictures a breeze
via Creative Mac
December was art month at the Art of Geography. A two foot square mounted print of Hydromancy at the antipodes of Elysium sold at a gallery, and another painting was selected by a magazine to use on their cover. I will post the details of the magazine issue as soon as it comes out. 
New non-destructive image editor: Naked Light: "Naked Light, a unique new image editor, offers a simplistic interface as well as advanced features; Naked Light will allow users to take advantage of non-destructive image editing. The application is advertised as re-inventing how image editing works, featuring node-based compositing and live filters, as well as a concept called 'Infinite Resolution...
Requires OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
(Via The Macintosh News Network.)
"Are you wondering what the photo georeferencing "feature" in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is like? Find a photo that has latitude and longitude already encoded in its EXIF metadata. Open it with the Preview Application, turn on the inspector, and voila, under the "More Info" tab you get the metadata above a small world map:"
Carnegie Mellon University researchers, working with NASA Ames Research Center scientists, have developed an inexpensive robotic device that allows any digital camera to take gigapixel panoramic photographs, known as GigaPans. The technology is being used by students to document their communities and by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to make Civil War sites accessible on the Web. The system uses a tripod-like mount to allow digital cameras to take hundreds of overlapping images of landscapes, buildings, or rooms.
"Classic situation: You are in a church with a beautiful stain-glass window. You want to take a photo but you realize you have to make a choice: you either take a slow exposure shot of the window, meaning that the rest of the image will be way underexposed, or you try to take a photo of the whole thing, leaving the window very overexposed, meaning you will not see any of the beauty of the window. What do you do? Well, normally you have to make a choice, because the sad reality of either film or digital cameras is that they have a very limited dynamic range.