2022 – 360º Photo Of My Neighborhood From A Fountain
(ignore April 30, 2022 publish date – this was published on March 30, 2022)
Here’s my neighborhood, courtesy of Google Earth in 2018:
You can see my separate apartment sitting on the roof of my 6-story building (and why I’m the 7th-floor tenant in a 6-story building). You can also see that I’m surrounded by 3 churches and a parking lot that my living room looks out on.
If that’s not enough religion for you, you might have also noticed a convent in the lower left. That’s where the nuns who tortured me and my siblings for 8 years lived. That school and church were just north of the convent.
Other structures in the image include apartment buildings and a school.
In the middle of all this sits Anderson Park, which – for some odd reason – used to be called “Church Square”. Why would that be odd? Well, it’s obviously a rectangle.
In the middle of the park, you can see what looks like a pool. Actually, it’s a fountain.
This is a picture of the fountain that I took from the closest corner of my roof in 1996 (before the fountain was painted blue):
You can see a square structure in the middle of the fountain from which the water shoots skyward. Keep that square in mind, as it is literally central to this post.
Last Saturday, I saw signs all around the Baptist Church and school across the street advertising a crafts show. Since I had never attended any function at that church before, I decided to take a look.
On my way back, I happened to look over at the park, saw the waterless fountain (off during cold weather) and the bare trees and the thought popped into my head that maybe I could shoot something interesting with my new toy: the PANO setting on my iPhone.
If no water had collected in the pool part, maybe I could climb in and stand on that square structure in the middle and take a 360º panoramic shot of the neighborhood.
There was no water in it, so I climbed in and on.
I decided to start by pointing east at the Second Reformed Church because that frame would also include the park’s American flag. I would start and finish with the same image, making it 360º+.
One problem………….
The PANO shut off when I had only made half a turn. I tried again…………same result.
I decided to try to spin super-fast on the fountain square without falling.
I didn’t fall, but this is what I got (click to enlarge):
Friggin’ useless.
The only thing left to try was two halves…………but who knows if they would line up?
Of course they didn’t, but an afternoon of a little off the top of one and maybe a bit off the bottom of the other combined with not having a dividing line that went through anything unlineupable AND eliminating all traces of fountain edges finally produced this (click TWICE to fully enlarge and get to scrolling left to right):
Note that there’s a second flag in the background in the first and last frames and that the breeze was different in both, so I didn’t have the “luxury” of fudging the same frame into both places.
SUCCESS!!
But I feel bad that I couldn’t include the central ingredient – the fountain – in the finished product, so to make up for that, I’m going to borrow from my 2016 “Best of” post and show you my two favorite fountain shots (and text):
Across the street in Anderson Park, they turn on the fountain every spring. What the workers didn’t know was that someone had apparently gummed the works up with detergent, making the wading-pool area into a soapy bathtub. It took them two days to get it all cleared out, but it was a definite first to see soap suds reach as high as the flag.
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