The stone observatory on the Bloody lane is now finished and ready for visitors. The view from this point alone is worth a visit to the famous Bloody lane as you can take in the entire right to the left nearly four miles. There will be, when all planted, nearly four hundred markers, giving one a good idea of the entire battle field with the advantage of the good roads. Every body ought to visit it and make a study of this great battle.
Virtual Antietam Panoramas
Submitted by StephenRecker on Sat, 11/23/2013 - 8:08am
Look here.
The first thing I did when I arrived in Western Maryland from California in 2002 was to begin working on the panoramas for Virtual Antietam. I took over two hundred and then spent about three years polishing about 128 of them. Unfortunately, the hard drive on which they resided died about two months ago. I am having someone look at it, but in the mean time I have found my original backup discs.
The good news is that the brushed picts are there. The bad news is that they are each on a single CD-ROM. Also, they are all 200+ before I numbered them and trimmed them down to 128. Anyway, that is a simple production process and I have a fresh disc drive ingesting them one at a time. Finding the time to copy them all should take about a week, and then renumbering them another week.
In early December I will be looking around for the new cool way to turn panoramic images into web-viewable interactive panoramas. This is really the fun part for me, figuring out how to stretch the current technology to interpret the photographs.
In the mean time you are free to enjoy the five or so panoramas that I put up on the site about a year ago. This is McClellan's Headquarters. It is a nice view, but those dern folks at Save Historic Antietam Foundation have been working as hard a beavers to knock down the trees that block the view of Antietam battlefield from here, so I may have to re-take this to take advantage of their efforts.
Also, during the Center For Civil War Photography's conference last year, I took one looking out the roof of the Pry House. I have not stitched a pano in a while, but that might be worth revisiting that part of the process.
About
Hello. I'm Stephen Recker and welcome to my blog. In it I will be discussing the different projects I am working on related to the American Civil War with a focus on photography related to the battle of Antietam. I am particularly interested in how the battlefield has been interpreted throughout the years. I will be discussing how it was done then and how new technologies can be brought to bear to bring life to those old materials as well as new ones. See the 99 Places Every Antietam Battlefield Guide Should Know.
Sharpsburg Items
Antietam Valley Record
Thursday, September 5, 1895