Ego inflation

This may well be the closest I get to my 15 minutes of fame... I've had one of my photographs used by a local body election campaign, to promote one of the mayoral candidates. It's been blown up to 6 metres and is currently on a billboard on the Lower Hutt to Wellington motorway.

Back story: Rewind to 2005 when I lived at the top of a hill with panoramic views. Keen to experiment with the photo panorama feature in Photoshop, I dropped the camera on the tripod and banged off a few shots of my view, to make a panorama from.

This was only a cheap 3MP camera, nothing special. But with 7 overlapping shots, it becomes a 20 megapixel (approximately) image. This is big enough to do something serious with.

In a fit of philanthropic fervour, I uploaded a reduced-size version of this image to Wikipedia's article on Lower Hutt. You can also see the image here.

Fast forward to Sep 2007. Local election campaign time. Ray Wallace, one of the mayoral candidates, used the image from Wikipedia on his website, and asked for a full-size version to make into a billboard. An agreement was reached and a CD provided.

For my local readers (of which I know there is at least one) - look to the left side of the road, just past Bowl-land as you drive into Wellington.

There's another one by the Petone Railway station, and another by the side of the motorway into Wellington... snapshots below










Gratifying.

I promise not to indulge in too much egostroking in future postings...