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.
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!
Today at City Hall on Church Street Mayor Duffy greeted a large crowed including Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, George Eastman, and other honorable guests. To commemorate Rochester’s official day of incorporation in 1834 there was a with a super-sized 175 birthday cake at City Hall.
Yesterday Mac Village Productions had the pleasure and honor of being able to participate in Rochester, NY’s first ever Twestival event which was supported the event – Charity: Water.
Virtual Tour by Mac Village Productions
The event was coordinated by master marketer Matthew Ray in just a little over 2 weeks, and with short notice manged to pull in some of Rochester’s best technical and social media talent, and hottest bands.
Join me on Thursday February 12th for the Rochester Twestival which is a global charity event on February 12th, 2009 that is being held around the world to raise money for Charity: Water.
Mac Village Productions will be there to support the event and twit with his friends and also produce both a slide show and Twestival 360 Virtual Tour which is being donated to the Twestival and added to the site shortly after the event to record this great charity.
Twitter got involved by wanting to be a part of creating an event that would incorporate the social media market, as well as raise money for a well deserving cause. Charity: Water is a non for profit organization that concentrates on building wells in developing nations that do not have access to clean drinking water. Scott Harrison, the founder of Charity: Water has made it a mission to provide as many people as he can with something that many of us take for granted on a daily basis; clean and safe water.
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