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Co-op City

Panorama

Here are some images from the panorama:

Get the download, install it, restart your browser if needed, and then Reload this page (since the old non-image image will still be in your cache, if you see the LivePicture logo on a white background instead of the plug-in puzzle piece. On reload you should see what looks like Venetian blinds, and then they'll fill in to a view of Manhattan from Co-op City. Put your cursor into the picture and drag it around. The speed of the pan is proportional to the distance of the drag.)

This page works with Internet Explorer. Finding the Plug-In doesn't work as well in Netscape yet.

     Drag the image, or click on it to get focus, then
     use arrow buttons to move it.
     'a' zooms in.
     'z' zooms out.
     Pretend you are operating a remotely controlled
     camera atop Building 7.
     Would more resolution be worth the size? (The base
     images were scanned at only 75 dpi.)
I shot this from the roof of Building 7 (120 DeKruif Place, Bronx NY 10475, 12 miles northeast of Midtown Manhattan) in late August, 1985. I used the stairs to get to the roof, and climbed a ladder to the elevator penthouse. Because this building has a water tower which is not as easily climbed, the pictures were shot in two sets. Slightly more than half are south of the water tower (Key Food around counterclockwise to the first of the Benchley Place towers -- see the seam there), the rest north of it, from that seam back to Key Food.

The south view was like the back of my hand, out our apartment (except being only on the 24th floor, we couldn't usually see over the Chevron to Manhattan); the north view was foreign to me.

Note the Blimp before Manhattan. Note the vacant lot that became Bay Plaza, and the construction being completed on I-95. There is a pigeon on the railing of the E wing, but I can't see it in these scans. Maybe the Yonkers reservoir is visible.

And of course note the Twin Towers at the south of the City skyline.

Taped together, these photos form a strip 6 inches high by about 10 feet long. I've put it up over my desk when my office situation has allowed. Not shown here, but I labeled many of the landmarks.

I used a Canon FtB 35mm SLR with a Vivitar 35-105mm Zoom (set to 105mm) in portrait mode. The alignment is by hand, aligning the horizon with the central rectangle in the viewfinder, and trying to overlap landmarks.

Looking at prints, it's clear the film plane isn't exactly normal to the lens plane or something -- I need a trapezoidal warp.

By the time I got it scanned, I lost most of the overlap, and Live Photo's Photo Vista (apparently now an I See Media product) did a lousy job. No trapezoidal warping, and also it stacked the photos much too close for too much overlap, completely losing Truman, for instance. Some late night I'll redo this in Photo Impact.

Here is a smaller view of the entire stitched image:

Here it is with reduced quality (75% JPEG) and size (566k):

If you've got a T1/LAN, this might work (full JPEG quality, 3 Meg):

Links to other sites on the Web:

Panoguide: Guide to panoramic photography

The instructions above come from the ISeeMedia Zoom page on Panoguide.
The IVR file was generated with LivePicture's PhotoVista. That company is hard to find.

© 2000 chesler@post.harvard.edu

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