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The first sawmill was built on these falls in 1774, and power from Otter Creek has been a cohesive force in Middlebury Village ever since. On the other side of the row of buildings above the falls is a 19th century Main Street which today includes the mix of progressive, utilitarian, and quaint businesses you would expect in a Vermont town.
Elevation: 107 m (350 ft), Camera location from GPS: N43 57.188 W73 59.550 Notes: I used a Nikon D40 with Nikkor 300mm f/4.5 AI-s lens at f/8, 1/125 (bottom rows) to 1/200 (top rows), ISO 200, NEF. 35mm equiv is 450mm, and field of view was set to 3.1 degrees. Two second shutter delay was initiated by wireless remote. Lightroom was used to remove vignetting and increase exposure and saturation before outputting jpegs for stitching. |
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This vegetable garden is in the well-drained sandy loam of a 13,000 year old ice-contact alluvial fan. Soil fertility is enhanced by tilling under 30 cm of tree leaves each autumn, and several cm of composted cow manure each spring. During the growing season, beds are mulched with compost and old hay. Most of the produce is eaten fresh, but potatoes, onions, and garlic are stored, and 2 dozen quarts of tomatoes are preserved.
Notes: This panorama required variable focus, but some areas confounded the autofocus, so the imager was monitored and paused if the camera failed to take a shot in time. The shot was then completed manually before the imager was resumed. |
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The ancient delta in the center foreground was farmland in the late 19th century, and became Branbury State Park in 1945. The sandy sediments have been worked into the best beach on the lake.
The vantage point is an outcrop of Cheshire quartzite surrounded by one of Vermont’s rarest forest communities. The thin soil supports a sparse forest of pitch pines (Pinus rigida) with white and red pine (P. strobus, P. resinosa), and white, red, and chestnut oak (Quercus alba, Q. rubra, Q. prinus). This GigaPan can be viewed in its geographic context here: http://conservation.townofsalisbury.org/panoramas/lakedunmore/index.htm |
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The property and yellow buildings of the Bread Loaf Campus were bequeathed to Middlebury College by Joseph Battell in 1915 (the white buildings are more recent). Since 1920, this campus has been home to the Bread Loaf School of English, which offers summer graduate courses and an MA degree. In 1926, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference began operation here. Most of the buildings are vacant except in the summer months.
Elevation: 440 m (1440 ft), Camera location from GPS: N43 57.188 W73 59.550 Notes: I used a Nikon D40 with a Nikkor 300mm f/4.5 AI-s lens at f/11, 1/320 second, ISO 200, NEF. 35mm equiv is 450mm, and field of view was set to 3.1 degrees. Focus was manually adjusted many times. Two second shutter delay was initiated by wireless remote. Lightroom was used to remove vignetting before outputting jpegs for stitching. |
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The town of Addison is the flattest and the most fertile part of Vermont. The plain extending west to Lake Champlain was the bottom of a glacial lake and post-glacial estuary from 14,000 to 11,000 years ago. The clayey sediments are more than 30m deep in places. The soils are slow to dry and require powerful equipment to work, but the high cation exchange capacity of the clays allows great natural fertility. About 90% of the field crops here are corn and hay for dairy feed -- this is where Ben and Jerry's ice cream starts.
I counted about 180 silos in the scene. |
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In 1861, Joseph Battell remodeled a farmhouse into an inn (in distance left of center) which became a successful summer getaway and was incrementally enlarged during his lifetime. Today the inn and surrounding buildings are part of Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf Campus where the Bread Loaf School of English and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference take place each summer. During his life, Battell bought 40,000 acres in Vermont, and left much of it to Middlebury College in 1915. Most of this land was subsequently transferred to the Green Mountain National Forest and to the state of Vermont. The college still owns the land used for its Nordic and alpine ski areas and the Bread Loaf Campus.
Elevation: 440 m (1440 ft), Camera location from GPS: N43 57.199 W72 59.570 Notes: I used a Nikon D40 with a Nikkor 300mm f/4.5 AI-s lens at f/11, 1/400 second (lowest rows at 1/320 sec), ISO 200, NEF. 35mm equiv is 450mm, and field of view was set to 3.4 degrees. Focus was manually adjusted many times. Two second shutter delay was initiated by wireless remote. Lightroom was used to remove vignetting before outputting jpegs for stitching. Abundant misalignment errors may be due to insufficient overlap among photos, and/or to manually adjusting the focus. |
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The West Castleton Fold was the subject of my second ever (non-robotic) GigaPan (http://share.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=1204). This shot illustrates the axial region of a recumbant syncline in the Poultney Formation of the Giddings Brook Slice of the Taconic Allochthon. This outcrop is a textbook example of axial cleavage-bedding relations in the hinge of a fold. There are some remarkably ptygmatically folded quartz-rich layers interbedded with the slates. Although the light was not optimal when I visited it this summer, I was able to shoot a far more detailed GigaPan using the Epic100 robot. Light was fading as sunset approached, so I've taken this shot into Photoshop in order to try to optimize the image. The original (pre-photoshopping) metadata is included below: Stitcher Notes: GigaPan Stitcher version 0.4.4090 (Windows) Panorama size: 4250 megapixels (88928 x 47795 pixels) [Cropped in Photoshop to 4032 megapixels - 85663 x 47063 pixels] Input images: 840 (35 columns by 24 rows) Field of view: 87.1 degrees wide by 46.8 degrees high (top=42.8, bottom=-4.0) Settings: All default settings Original image properties: Camera make: Canon Camera model: Canon PowerShot SX10 IS Image size: 3648x2736 (10.0 megapixels) Capture time: 2009-06-03 19:07:07 - 2009-06-03 20:01:44 Aperture: f/5.7 Exposure time: 0.025 ISO: 200 Focal length (35mm equiv.): 565.2 mm Digital zoom: off White balance: Fixed Exposure mode: Manual Horizontal overlap: 23.9 to 51.8 percent Vertical overlap: 23.4 to 68.4 percent Computer stats: 3069.98 MB RAM, 2 CPUs Total time 14:38:02 (1:02 per picture) Alignment: 3:45:13, Projection: 45:49, Blending: 10:06:59 |