28 Jul 2003 MichaelCrawford   » (Master)

Enjoy My Photography

Burning Man is an arts festival held each summer in the Black Rock desert, a playa (mud flat) in the north west corner of the U.S. state of Nevada. A giant wooden sculpture of a man presides over the event. The Man is burned on the final night of the festival.

A new Man is built in a studio in San Francisco each year, at great labor and expense, then trucked to the playa, only to be burned again.

Here is a panoramic photo, composed of 12 35mm photographs, scanned and stitched with Live Picture's Photovista:

Most people use digital cameras to take panoramic photos for presentation as 360 degree scrollable QuickTime VR content in web pages. I prefer to shoot mine with 35 mm slide or print film, then scan them at high resolution with a flatbed scanner or Photo CD. My intention is to eventually print them on a large format printer at a service bureau, frame them and put them on the wall, or possibly get a gallery show someday. One of the women who runs the Burning Man festival requested such a print for their office, but sadly I have never got it together to give her one. I still plan to though.

I have a much higher resolution version of the above image on my website. Please wait patiently while it downloads.

Unfortunately both images are watermarked. I used the PhotoVista Demo to stitch it. Althoug PhotoVista was inexpensive, and I even worked at Live Picture, I never obtained a registered copy of the program, and I believe it to be unavailable now that Live Picture is bankrupt. There is some hope PhotoVista will be revived, as Live Picture's assets ultimately ended up owned by Roxio. I would be quite interested to find out about other panorama stitching applications, especially programs that were Free Software.

I have a number of other panoramic photos waiting to be scanned and stitched. I visited Paris and Rome in November of 1997, and have panoramas of the Notre Dame, the Arc du Triomphe, underneath and on top of the Eiffel Tower, and the Vatican. I also have one taken in the studio of my artist friend Marilyn Churchill showing a couple dozen of her paintings. Unfortunately I have hundreds of slides I would like to scan to Photo CD, but as they cost more than a dollar per image, it is a significant expense.

I do already have about 300 Photo CD scans of my conventional photography. Someday when I have much more free time I will scale and thumbnail many of them to place on my art and music website. I would be interested also to hear about Free Software that can do automated scaling and thumbnailing directly from Photo CD.

Here is The Man himself. I think it is one of my favorite pictures that I have ever taken. I'm sorry I don't have a somewhat larger version online yet:

There are hundreds if not thousands of works of art on display each year at Burning Man. There is music as well - at some of the festivals they have had a 24 hour a day rave taking place about a mile from the main camp. Besides sculptures, there are art cars and live performances. Even some of the people are works of art, being dressed only in elaborate body paint. Here's a sculpture I found intriguing for its pleasing simplicity:

Thank you for your attention.

-- Mike

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