Carousel Carving Studio

This is the carving studio of the Albany Brass Ring Carousel project, in Albany, Oregon. They are working to create a hand-built carousel for the area, eventually to become a world-class museum with the help of a major manufacturer. The facility has four different areas: a museum/gift shop, a painting studio, the platform and mechanism shop, and the carving studio. All areas are open to the public, and the carvers are happy to talk about their work and show people around. The place has a personal interest for us because one of my daughters loves carousels, and the other volunteers here monthly.

(Click here to view the interactive picture in a new tab.)

This VR was taken for the World Wide Panorama “performance” theme. Here is my WWP page for that entry. It stretched the meaning of the theme a bit, but there are no hard rules and it was fun to do something a little different. My goal was to show how the people “exhibit” their work for the public, both in terms of the many illustrations around and their willingness to talk with people directly. To illustrate the subject itself, I tried to capture the diversity of work, and a close shot of one of the pieces.

Technically it came out ok, although the colors are a little off. I still struggle a bit with getting that right; the natural tendency is to do adjustments while looking at a small area of the scene, but it ends up not optimal for the whole picture. I did take a nadir shot, looking straight down. For some reason things didn’t want to stitch perfectly, but a little tweaking of control points and work in Photoshop layers brought everything in line. The light level was low enough that shutter speed was too slow to freeze people. I raised the ISO to 800 to compensate, but this resulted in noticeable image noise. Fortunately software was able to take it down to a reasonable level.

This is a fun location to photograph, and I’d like to go back and take another VR of at least of the shop. Until then, we’ll keep visiting.