By:John Opie (JohnF) on July 20, 2009
Tags: empire , state , building , new , york , central , park , olympus , e510

This is a yet another redo of a previous gigapan, as I corrected the white balance. The camera was (mis-)set to 7500°, I corrected it in Lightroom

A few notes on how this was done, and why there are some funky edges on 7x7 image.

Kit: Epic 100, Olympus E510, 40-150 lens, 150mm (35mm: 300mm)

No tripods are allowed on the Observatory Deck of the Empire State Building, both as a safety requirement and to cut down on photographers heading up there with their view cameras or gigapans on a nice day and hogging all the good corners. :-) This means that you can't use a gigapan, since it is not something that you can hand-hold. Being the ornery person I am, I searched for an alternative.

I got around this by using a monopod with base feet, a Manfrotto unit that I had picked up years and years ago and only recently discovered actually had the feet, which are nothing more than steel rods, threaded to fit into screwed sockets at the base to provide a modicum of support. I wrote the corporation that runs the Empire State Building if this was acceptable, but received no answer, so when I was recently in New York, I simply went there. I passed through security with no problem, with the head of security commenting that a monopod was allowable.

I then set up the Epic 100 at the top of the Empire State Building on the monopod.

While the unit is impressively stable compared to not having base feet at all, it does sway quite a bit if left to its own devices. Hence I made sure to brace the monopod as well as I could, trying to keep the balance centered on the unit, but found that I need a lot more practice to get this down right. Hence I stopped the first one I did (and erased it from the card) and upped the FOV so that I would get a fair amount of overlap to compensate for the swaying of the gigapan, which does generate a fair amount of torque when tranversing rows or columns.

So, that's the secret of how to do a gigapan where no tripods are allowed: use something that isn't a tripod, but pretends to be.

Date Taken: July 20, 2009
Date Added: August 26, 2009
Bookmarked: 2 times
Total Views: 561 views
Snapshots: 22
Size: 0.13 gigapixels
Field of View: 24.7 degrees wide, 20.2 degrees high
Stitcher Notes: view
GigaPan Stitcher version 0.4.4090 (Windows)
Panorama size: 129 megapixels (12547 x 10298 pixels)
Input images: 49 (7 columns by 7 rows)
Field of view: 24.7 degrees wide by 20.2 degrees high (top=2.7, bottom=-17.5)
Settings:
All default settings
Original image properties:
Camera make: OLYMPUS IMAGING CORP.
Camera model: E-510
Image size: 3648x2736 (10.0 megapixels)
Capture time: 2009-07-20 21:08:57 - 2009-07-20 21:11:16
Aperture: f/8
Exposure time: 0.004
ISO: 100
Focal length (35mm equiv.): unknown
Digital zoom: off
White balance: Fixed
Exposure mode: Manual
Horizontal overlap: 58.9 to 62.3 percent
Vertical overlap: 40.5 to 62.5 percent
Computer stats: 2046.38 MB RAM, 2 CPUs
Total time 1:24:11 (1:43 per picture)
Alignment: 13:08, Projection: 4:02, Blending: 1:07:00