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About This GigaPan
Toggle- Taken by
-
David Engle
- Explore score
- 114
- Size
- 0.07 Gigapixels
- Views
- 8557
- Date added
- September 23, 2009
- Date taken
- September 20, 2009
- Gear
-
Nikon D-70 & Various Portr...
- Categories
- Galleries
- Competitions
- Tags
- d70, isbell, ike, hurricane, galveston, 23x1, broadway, 17th
- Description
-
The people that own this property, Allen and Mikey Isbell, are ministering to this congregation of people and are having Sunday Church Services in their greenhouse or sun-room as seen in this 360-degree panorama. A panorama of their actual church building has been seen in an earlier panorama: tinyurl.com/Galveston002
This congregation of people are waiting for the construction and repair of their building (Ike caused major interior damage) to be complete before they return, and each Sunday until then are meeting in the Isbell's greenhouse as explained in this newspaper articles from September and November, 2008: tinyurl.com/5ferpn
and tinyurl.com/mkc4hk
Over my lifetime, I have attended a few churches and have listened to a fair number of sermons, and I must honestly say that this service was sort of unique to me as I have never been among a group of people that have been through so much pain and agony as what these have been through this past year and still are excited about the work and the path that is set before them as they continue to help those that are in need in the city of Galveston, Texas.I was uplifted by Allen's sermon and was touched by their overwhelming friendliness and acceptance of me, a visitor, into their meeting place and would return more often if it were not for the long distance that separates Galveston from Houston.
They have invited me back for their first church service in their renovated church building to take another GigaPan and I look forward to that occasion, whenever it may be.
Note: This panorama can be seen in Google Earth as a beautiful 360-degree curved panorama on a curved surface by clicking the link, View in Google Earth.
This hand-held panorama was taken with a Nikon D-70 using a Nikkor 28-80 f/3.3-5.6 G lens and was stitched using the GigaPan Stitcher software. Additional information can be seen in Stitcher Notes.
Stitcher Notes
ToggleMinimizeGigaPan Stitcher version 0.4.4329 (Macintosh)
Panorama size: 69 megapixels (23210 x 3003 pixels)
Input images: 23 (23 columns by 1 rows)
Field of view: 360.0 degrees wide by 46.6 degrees high (top=18.9, bottom=-27.7)
Settings:
All default settings
Original image properties:
Camera make: NIKON CORPORATION
Camera model: NIKON D70
Image size: 1197x3008, 1274x3008, 1370x3005, 1460x3008, 2000x3008, 896x3008 (2.7 megapixels - 6.0 megapixels)
Capture time: 2009-09-20 11:24:52 - 2009-09-20 11:27:10
Aperture: f/14
Exposure time: 0.0125
ISO: unknown
Focal length (35mm equiv.): unknown
White balance: unknown
Exposure mode: unknown
Horizontal overlap: 8.2 to 85.2 percent
Computer stats: 2048 MB RAM, 2 CPUs
Total time 7:29 (0:19 per picture)
Alignment: 1:37, Projection: 0:57, Blending: 4:54

fetching snapshots...
lipa stauber (June 22, 2011, 02:55AM )
nice 360 view www.3dpan.org/33404
David Engle (October 11, 2009, 04:50PM )
You have made some good comments, which I have been reflecting on these past few days. Every GigaPan presents a unique situation, especially so with taking panoramas of people in the different situations we have been chatting about these past weeks. As I see it, you have done more than I have with moving crowds and by now, you sort of know what to do from your past experiences. For me, I too have learned from my mistakes and by that, I mean to say that I tend to have a more controlled environment where the subject or subjects are posed as in this panorama taken in Galveston after a church service. In this current pano, I did not have fleeting ladies (www.gigapan.org/gigapans/15029/snap shots/44250/), nor did I suffer fleeting feet (www.gigapan.org/gigapans/19298/snap shots/58027/). But I am always happy with the results that I upload to gigapan dot org, simply for the reason I I mentioned before: *The key is artistic control and every GigaPan or panorama has its pluses and minuses. That's why this hobby of ours is so fascinating. *
The Gigapanographer Currently Known as "Kilgore661" (October 08, 2009, 02:18AM )
You are probably right about there being a happy medium, but I think it will take a lot of experience to work out where and what it is. The basic problem - as I see it - is that one does not have the opportunity to practice shooting groups of people, and groups of people have even less experience of being shot (as it were). In particular, I have yet to crack the problem of how to handle people who are in the overlap between adjacent images. Asking everybody to remain motionless for the entire duration of the shot is one option but not practical for large groups. I suppose one could try spreading people out more, perhaps into small groups with gaps between. This is essentially what I did in the Juarassic Coast group shot (tinyurl.com/ybzbc9z
). As you know, I work
in schools and I have thought about some kind of
system where the children are grouped into
numbered sections so that each child knows which
section they are in, then I could shout out
"OK, section two, you can move" and
"Get ready section three" etc. Another
idea is to rehearse the shot with some markers eg
broom handles stuck in the ground. Yet another is
to deliberately include everyone more than once by
asking them to move further down the line after
they have been photographed. That way one would
increase the chances that everyone will appear in
the photo at least once with the right number of
heads and limbs.
David Engle (October 02, 2009, 09:07AM )
There has to be a happy medium somewhere in all of this. Your Jane Austen GigaPan is pretty incredible and could not be done any other way. The focus problem is that that bad, and as you mentioned, the 100-plus audience did not help. But when you are famous, you will always attract a crowd. Contrast your situation with this GigaPan: A passo di Danza 1, gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=2241 0. It has 21 photos taken over 101 seconds, and not surprisingly shows some movement, but I admire his effort. My panorama on the other hand, has 23 stitched photos and was taken twice (with some pauses) and from the two sets, the final product was assembled. The key is artistic control and every GigaPan or panorama has its pluses and minuses. That's why this hobby of ours is so fascinating.
The Gigapanographer Currently Known as "Kilgore661" (October 02, 2009, 04:35AM )
I had a similar experience taking tinyurl.com/yarnp9y
- people wanted to get
away, it took too long, people weren't sure
what was expected of them, plus I was too far away
to talk to people directly - and I had an audience
of about 100 people while I was working which was
somewhat nerve-wracking. All sorts of things went
wrong and the image ulimately ended up out of
focus, but I learned a lot about what doesn't
work and what to do differently next time. In
essence, it boils down to this: employ half a
dozen really big, mean-looking guys with electric
cattle prods to keep people in line. One should
have a tazer gun in case someone tries to make a
break for it. Re using a gigapan, my idea was to
shoot the scene twice. First shoot the background,
then shoot just the people using columns so that
each person doesn't have to keep still for too
long. Then combine the two gigapans and stitch.
The first problem with this idea is that there is
no way of telling the imager "I want you to
take a 20 column, 3 row gigapan starting at column
7, row 8 of the last gigapan you took." The
result is that the two gigapans did not line up
very well. I discovered that in fact the gigapan
stitcher deals with this surprisingly well -
images that are supposed to be columns can be half
a picture out and the stitcher copes with it.
However, I didn't have the patience to combine
the 1600 images of the background with the 256
images of the people (plus 120 images of the
foreground grass that I missed when I did the
background) so I chucked everything into Autopano.
After many, many untrapped crashes and quite a few
unfruitful requests for support, I upgraded my
machine to 8Gb and 64-bit Winders, and found that
I could just about stitch and render half the the
gigapan. Fortunately there were half a Royal
Crescent's-worth of people left by the time I
finished shooting the people, so I didn't have
to leave anyone out, although obviously, having
only half of the houses is very disappointing. One
advantage to using Autopano is that I could render
the people using Smartblend which is phenomenally
good at resolving issues caused by movement. I
don't recommend you buy Autopano because in my
experience it is too buggy and I think it is
expensive, but it is worth knowing that this is an
option should you wish to come over to the Dark
Side of stitching.
David Engle (September 28, 2009, 05:05PM )
Good point, but as you might determine from Stitcher Notes, this GigaPan took maybe a bit more than five minutes to complete. People were anxious to leave and eat or whatever people usually do after Church. A longer time could have been taken to make a larger panorama with a robot, but as you can tell in this panorama, there is minimal stitching problems, which for this bunch, we would have had many stitching errors had I used the robot.
The Gigapanographer Currently Known as "Kilgore661" (September 28, 2009, 03:13PM )
I think it is a near-perfect advertisement for people who might want to advertise or record their community. It would be even better if it was larger - that's just my opinion though.
David Engle (September 28, 2009, 03:52AM )
Thanks Kilgore661, After Services were over with, there was very little planning. Everyone just fell in place so-to-speak, and I took two sets of photographs and from those two sets, I constructed the 360-panorama.
The Gigapanographer Currently Known as "Kilgore661" (September 28, 2009, 02:22AM )
Excellent pano David. A community with a story - absolutely what gigapan is about. Nice sharp image with some interesting details too.