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Ever since I saw miao's GigaPan of "A city near Route 80" (http://www.gigapan.org/alpha/gigapans/15148/) I've been salivating at the chance to get back to Garrett Mountain to shoot a massive GigaPan from the same vantage point. The spot is very well suited for GigaPanning - an overlook with an unobstructed view and plenty of detail that ought to be highly explorable. What more could I ask for?
Better weather. Unfortunately the day that I finally got out there to shoot this monster turned out to be the kind of day that drives a GigaPanner to tears - partly cloudy skies - tantalizing stretches of clear blue sky punctuated by white puffy clouds whose devestating effects on the lighting of the scene belie their benign outward appearance. With over 1000 input images this GigaPan took well over an hour to capture. Naturally, the mostly sunny conditions that I set up for lasted just long enough to convince me that they would prevail, but by the time the bulk of the foreground shots were being snapped the conditions had morphed to mostly cloudy and the resulting shots ended up pretty underexposed. What can you do? It wasn't a complete waste. I had a great conversation with a couple of passing bikers who were quite interested in the GigaPan technology (and far more knowledgable about it than your average passerby), and ultimately, despite the suboptimal exposures, the GigaPan Stitcher software took it all in stride and behaved like a trooper, outputting the largest GigaPan I've yet successfully stitched. I'm sure there'll still be plenty to explore and discover, but I'm still hoping that someday I'll have an opportunity to get back there and shoot this scene under better weather conditions. |
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An approximately 270 degree panorama from High Point, New Jersey. The view is from approximately east-southeast (left) to north-northeast (right). Three states are visible in this view: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. Lake Marcia is near the center of the image and Port Jervis, NY is near the right side of the image. The panorama was shot from the southwest corner of the base of the High Point monument. At the time of uploading, this is my largest GigaPan yet, and first to exceed 5 gigapixels. (Someday they'll fix the 360 degree stitching bug and I may have others this size to upload.) |
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Taken on a cold October afternoon (10/17/09) overlooking Turtle Pond from a Belvedere Castle overlook, this is one of the largest GigaPans I've taken yet. Almost 1150 images large, this took an entire afternoon to stitch using the newest GigaPan software (version 1.0). Note the top of the castle spire -- those are the instruments which record the official New York City weather. I'm sure this GigaPan would look better on a sunny day -- but there was something very nice about the windy autumn day that I think is well captured in this photograph. Also, the water is stripped in this image because the wind was really swirling and blowing the water around in all sorts of directions.
When it was built, the view from Belvedere Castle provided a vista over the rectangular receiving reservoir, which has been replaced by the Great Lawn, an oval of turf with eight baseball diamonds, loosely defined by plantings of trees in clumps in the manner of the English landscape garden, and, at the foot of Vista Rock, the Turtle Pond, redesigned in 1997 as a naturalistic planting, in which no single vantage-point reveals the water's full extent. Sunken concrete shelving at varying depths provide ideal water depths for shoreline plants such as lizard's tail, bullrush, turtlehead, and blueflag iris. The success of habitat for birds, insects, amphibians, and reptiles is embodied in sightings of species of dragon-fly not previously sighted in Central Park. My Homepage: http://www.michaelhussey.com |
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Large panorama of a roadcut near Gouverneur, NY known as "The Trainwreck". There are remarkable boudinage features in this high-grade marble that mark the train cars scattered off the track. |
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This GigaPan was shot as the slices of bread surrounding the cold cuts in a "GigaPan sandwich". The day began sunny and I began to shoot a very large GigaPan from this lovely vantage point in downtown Keeseville, New York. About halfway through shooting this GigaPan sequence clouds rolled in. After about a half hour of shooting and another half hour spent waiting for the sun to return I finally got frustrated and gave up on the sunny image, aborting about midway through the originally planned shot.
Realizing that I had bitten off too much, I decreased the zoom and set up the same shot at lower resolution and optimized for cloudy conditions. This shot was completed (after a few pauses when the sun poked out again) and can be seen here: http://www.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=27062 By the time I finished the cloudy GigaPan, I saw a stretch of sunny skies headed my way again. I scrambled to set up the shot parameters that I could recall from the original sequence and positioned the camera as close as I could to the place where I previously left off. Once the sun came back out I embarked on completing the second half of the sunny image. Clouds returned before I completed the last three rows of the originally planned image, but by then I had successfully captured most of the interesting detail of the scene. You can see where the GigaPan is offset horizontally by about a quarter of a frame. Nonetheless, I had enough overlap that the Stitcher was able to successfully and seamlessly put together the two halves of this sunny image and salvage a GigaPan that at least approximates what I was originally shooting for. The moral of this story: shooting GigaPans on a partly cloudy day may cause much consternation and gnashing of teeth, but if one is patient and observant of the weather conditions a decent GigaPan (or two) may still be salvaged. |
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Sweeping panoramas are what the GigaPan excels at, so every once in a while you just have to climb a mountain and see as much real estate as you can.
I wonder if Champ - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champ_%28legend%29 - is lurking out there somewhere? |
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This GigaPan is a detail of the Taconic Angular Unconformity exposed near the east end of the roadcut illustrated in the GigaPan of the Lower Helderberg Group (). The Ordovician Austin Glen Formation (flysch, right) lies below the angular unconformity and the Silurian Rondout formation constitutes the relatively more resistant layers above the unconformity surface (left) (Marshak and Engelder, 1987). |
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The South Shore of Oahu from Point Panic in Kakaako. From here you can see the harbor, Ala Moana Beach Park, Magic Island, Waikiki and Diamond Head and some newly weds on the balcony of the John Dominis restaurant. |
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First shot i've taken that I feel was worth the extra time to photoshop and make perfect, including everything from the Mercedes Benz shoot to the cars stopped in traffic on the West Side Highway. Also what I think is the first shot taken at this resolution of the new Highline Park that's just opened. Definitely the most time i've ever spent working on a single picture...pretty good view from here. Printing as big as I can as well. enjoy! |
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High resolution view of the ductile deformation features exposed on the east face of a marble roadcut south of Potsdam, New York. |