The Daily Render

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future

Madison Offset
|| 3/5/2011 || 3:48 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
Madison Offset by Nikolas Schiller

With the protests taking place inside of the Wisconsin State Capitol, I decided to make a map of the area around the building.

View the Google Map of Madison, Wisconsin.

: detail :
Detail of Madison Offset by Nikolas Schiller

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Washington Circle Parallelogram
|| 9/15/2010 || 9:05 pm || + Render A Comment || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
Washington Circle Parallelogram by Nikolas Schiller

I’ve mostly stayed away from creating maps that were not perfectly symmetrical, but this unique map is an exception. In geometry, a parallelogram is a four-sided shape with two pairs of parallel sides. This miscellaneous map builds off of the basic parallelogram shape, but due to the way the imagery tessellates, this parallelogram has a unique repetitive design not found in any of my previous maps.

View the Google Map of Washington Circle in the District of Columbia.

: detail :
Detail of Washington Circle Parallelogram by Nikolas Schiller

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The Eye of Philadelphia
|| 3/7/2010 || 3:20 pm || + Render A Comment || ||

: rendered at 9,000 X 6,000 :
The Eye of Philadelphia by Nikolas Schiller

I’ve started working on a series for next month’s exhibition in Philadelphia. I’m not sure what final scope of the project will end up being, but I’m enjoying the act of making new maps again.

The first in this series is based off of the similarly pattered “eye” series that I used in locations like Kansas City, Missouri and Erie, Pennsylvania. The imagery used in this project is based off of two type of aerial photography from the USGS. This map employs the .75m per pixel spatial resolution that was published in 2004. You can read the metadata here.

While there is newer 2006 imagery at .15m per pixel, there has not been subsequent imagery added to the USGS servers since I made my first generation maps of this city. I found and requested newer imagery from the city of Philadelphia, but was met with no answer upon two e-mails. Therefore I had to follow-up with the older imagery that is slightly out-dated, but just as useful for what I am working on.

I chose .75m resolution imagery for the oblique nature of the imagery. This allows the viewer to see the sides of buildings they would otherwise not see if the photograph was taken directly above; which is the case with most orthorectified imagery. I’m please with the results and look forward to printing it out.

View the Google Map of Philadelphia.

: detail :

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Malfunction Junction Offset
|| 6/16/2009 || 1:35 pm || + Render A Comment || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
Malfunction Junction Offset by Nikolas R. Schiller

The other week I downloaded the aerial photography of downtown Birmingham, Alabama to make some maps for a friend of mine. Upon closer inspection of the geography, I found that there was a nicely formed highway interchange close to the downtown area that happened to be colloquially named “Malfunction Junction.” While other cities can also claim in having their own Malfunction Junction, this highway interchange is the first one I’ve read about.

When I started working on this map I intended to render a couple versions and recursively sample them to created a fractal map, but I wasn’t happy with the results, so I decided to go in a completely direction. This map did end up using previously sampled imagery, but it does not conform to that regular quilt projection format of a centralized kaleidoscope. Also, this map is not unlike some of my previous maps, like White House Sunrise or Minneapolis Sunset, however, I chose to name it differently based on the position of the kaleidoscope’s focal point, which is offset in the upper left hand corner. I spent a lot of time adjusting this location and as you can see in the last detail below, I was a few pixels off. Up next I’m probably going to work on the downtown area of Birmingham, but I’m really itching to start mapping Europe.

View the Google Map of Malfunction Junction in Birmingham, Alabama

: detail :
A location somewhere within the map

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A Navy Yard Perspective
|| 5/30/2009 || 1:43 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||

: rendered at 9,000 X 6,000 :
A Navy Yard Perspective by Nikolas R. Schiller

While on blogging hiatus, I made this map on May 12th, but didn’t post it. I don’t really have any rationale for not posting it except that I wanted to take a month off from blogging to see where my daily visitor threshold was; as in finding how many people visited my website without daily blogging. So in order to ascertain the data, I purposely withheld this entry.

Following up last year’s Artomatic maps, which also featured the area prior to development, I decided to try something a little different. When making this map I spent a lot of time working with the field of view parameters to create the depth of perspective. In the foreground (the lower half) you have a somewhat close-up view of the area around the Navy Yard Metro station in Southeast, Washington, DC and in the upper half you have a larger field of view that appears to stretch out to infinite. The aerial photography was taken in the spring of 2005 before the stadium and subsequent nearby development had been completed. Even if you look at the current Google Maps of the area, the construction of this year’s Artomatic venue had not even began.

View the Google Map of the Navy Yard in Washington, DC, which features newer imagery

: detail of the Navy Yard Metro prior to construction :
A location somewhere within the map

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A Gigapan of Erie Coke Corporation Eye
|| 3/22/2009 || 4:43 pm || Comments Off on A Gigapan of Erie Coke Corporation Eye || ||

After posting the map, I decided to upload it to the Gigapan website in order to add a little more interactivity to the map.

If you are subscribed to my RSS feed and are reading this on through your RSS reader, please click here to view it on my website or click here to view it on the Gigapan website.

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Erie Coke Corporation Eye
|| || 3:37 pm || Comments Off on Erie Coke Corporation Eye || ||

: rendered at 9,000 X 6,000 :
Erie Coke Corporation Eye by Nikolas R. Schiller

After I rendered Erie Coke Corporation Quilt, I sampled a portion of the map to create a derivative tessellation. I applied this tessellation to the miscellaneous projection template I created last year when I mapped downtown Kansas City, Missouri. While the previous version looked more like a human eye made of the highway, this rendition is about focusing in on the pollution coming from the smokestack at the Erie Coke Corporation. I tend to work in perfect symmetries and by centering the plant, this map becomes asymmetrical and somewhat out of balance. I achieved this by moving the center of kaleidescope to the right side, and after a few minor tweaks, I was able to magnify the smokestack without degrading the source aerial photography (see below). Or check out the interactive Gigapan.

View the Google Map of the Erie Coke Corporation outside of Erie, Pennsylvania

: detail :
A location somewhere within the map

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Eye 670 – A perspective of Interstate 670 in downtown Kansas City
|| 12/10/2008 || 3:04 pm || Comments Off on Eye 670 – A perspective of Interstate 670 in downtown Kansas City || ||

: rendered at 9,000 X 6,000 :
Eye 670 by Nikolas R. Schiller

Using this portion of Kansas City Quilt #2, I created this derivative map of downtown Kansas City, Missouri. This map is a unique map because it features aspects of the Lenz Projection and the Quilt Projection combined to create what looks like a human eye. By combing what it looks like with the location, I-670, the name of this map becomes a play on words.

View the Google Map of downtown Kansas City, Missouri

: detail :
A location somewhere within the map

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The National Archives Cross
|| 10/24/2008 || 1:38 pm || Comments Off on The National Archives Cross || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
National Archives Cross

So far I’ve made two other crosses: Mount Pleasant Cross and Memphis Cross. I am pretty sure how to make these now and future maps of this type will be added to it’s own special category on the sidebar. The cross above was chosen out of about 8 different tessellations and within this map is the National Archives at the center of the cross (hence the name), the Federal Trade Commission, the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Navy Memorial– which features a map of the western hemisphere (below), the Winfield Scott Hancock statue, the Grand Army of the Republic Memorial, and portions of the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden and the west building of the National Gallery of Art, which make the vertical and horizontal stripe.

For reference, click here to view the outdated Google Map of downtown Washington, DC.

: detail of the National Archives :
National Archives Cross - detail

: detail of the Navy Memorial :
National Archives Cross - detail

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Meridian Hill Park Hexagon Tessellation
|| 8/2/2008 || 1:59 pm || Comments Off on Meridian Hill Park Hexagon Tessellation || ||

: saved at 15,000 X 10,000 :
Meridian Hill Park Hexagon Tessellation by Nikolas R. Schiller

This is the first time I’ve made a tessellation using hexagon as the basis for the pattern. Normally, I simply use a square because its the easiest to tessellate. The last map I made using Photoshop was Clayton Quilt #3, which was constructed using one square tile six times and did not exhibit radial symmetry like most of my other Qulit projection maps.

This time around I used center portion of the source tile that I used for Meridian Hill Park Quilt #4 and to switch things up a bit, I cut out a perfect hexagon from the the tile instead of using the tile’s square shape as basis for the tessellation. With one hexagon cut out, I merely duplicated it and moved it around to create the irregular tiling above. The difficulty was that I had to adjust the hexagon tiles so that they were not overlapping. It wasn’t that difficult per se, but it took awhile to get them all lined up perfectly. I am quite pleased with the result and figure that I will use this process again sometime in the not-so-distance future.

View the Google Map of Meridian Hill Park in Washington, DC.

: detail :
Detail of Meridian Hill Park Hexagon Tessellation by Nikolas R. Schiller

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Nikolas Schiller is a second-class American citizen living in America's last colony, Washington, DC. This blog is my on-line repository of what I have created or found on-line since May of 2004. If you have any questions or comments, please contact: