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GigaPans from Rochester’s Veterans Day RPO Pops Spectacular

November 12, 2009 By 1 Comment

In honor of Rochester’s 175th Anniversary, the City of Rochester and the Veterans Outreach Center will present a special Veterans Day Concert featuring the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and special guests under the direction of Principal Pops Conductor Jeff Tyzik.

I was fortunate enough to be asked to shoot the GigaPans for this historic event in Rochester, and want to offer a special thank you to Gary Walker from the City to take the time to explain what a GigaPan is and introduce me to the audience. The picture below represent the GigaPans I was able to capture for during the event and if you want to create your own snapshots you can click on them.

Click to go to RPO Veterans GigaPan1
Click to go to RPO Veterans GigaPan2

If you want to take your own snapshots, the screencast below will provide you an overview of what to do and how to share them with friends and family.

If you attended this event, I hope you enjoyed it and this two photographs will provide a special memory for you and your loved ones.

Best Wishes,

Skeeter

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Getting ready for the Veterans Day RPO GigaPan

November 5, 2009 By 2 Comments
Click Picture to go to GigaPan

Whenever I go out to shoot a Virtual 360 Tour, the elements when shooting that I pay close attention to are accuracy of focus, proper exposure, and placement of the equipment. This is critical so that when the 12 photos are stitched together the software produces a flawless panoramic photograph that can be viewed giving the user a “of feeling of being there”.

Some examples of my more recent 360 Virtual Tours can be seen here:

Shooting a GigaPan has some of the same challenges as a 360 Virtual Tour along with a few others.  First and foremost instead of 12 pictures a GigaPan ends up being several hundred photos.  As a result of the large number of photographs that must be taken,  a motorized computer controlled rotator must be used to both position the camera and actually shoot each photograph.  However unlike a Virtual Tour both the exposure (amount of light the camera sees) and the focus point of each picture ends up being set manually and fixed to the same settings for every one of those hundreds of photographs!   This is done to help the stitching software create the GigaPan.   Finally the lens is set to maximum focal length (Zoomed In) so that each picture is taken as close up as possible, which allows the “Snapshot” effect to work when you view the GigaPan on GigaPan.org.

In preparation of this critical photo shoot on Veterans Day for the City of Rochester, I spent the afternoon today at the Blue Cross Arena determining how best to configure the camera.   Also key here was to determine where the best vantage point would be to take this GigaPan, knowing the critical element of this picture really is YOU the audience!  So below is a video of my adventures today at the Blue Cross Area, and below that is what I produced as a result of my testing.

Todays Experience

GigaPan from Todays Efforts

I hope you enjoyed this blog post and I look forward to seeing you and hopefully “catching YOU in a little bit of history”, so that your families will be able to enjoy and share the experience too!

Skeeter

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What is a GigaPan?

November 3, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Rochester, NY High Falls Fall 2009

A GigaPan is a special type of Panoramic photograph that is actually comprised of 100′s of individual photos that are all stitched together creating a huge high definition photograph. They can range anywhere from several hundred megabytes in size to the largest one yet produced which weighs in at 32GB’s!

Here is an example of one I recently took of Rochester, NY High Falls.
Rochester, NY High Falls Fall 2009
Click here to see the full GigaPan!

I am fortunate to be asked by the City of Rochester to create a GigaPan of the upcoming Veterans Day’s event with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra at the Blue Cross Arena on November 11th, 2009. The press release from the City of Rochester can be seen here.

One of the really cool capabilities of a GigaPan photo is the ability to take Snapshots and then share those snapshots with friends and family. This is of particular interest since the Blue Cross Arena will be full of family members and loved ones and you will be able to find yourself in the panoramic and then share that snapshot with loved ones.

Below is a brief Screencast that will introduce you to a GigaPan and how they work!

I hope you enjoy and I look forward to seeing you at this historic event!

Skeeter

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