About this Y

From most places in the Provo / Orem area, if you look to the east you will see a large “Y” halfway up the mountain. This block letter, originally planned to be the center of the a three-letter “B Y U”, has remained on the hill since 1906. The 30-minute (or 45-minutes if you take breaks) hike to the “Y” has long been a rite of passage for young BYU students.

There’s something about looking out to a distant peak or spot high on a hill and first saying to yourself “I want to go up there” and then later saying to yourself “I’ve been up there.” whenever you see it. Just as you can see the Y from almost anywhere in Provo or the surrounding areas, from the Y you can see just about everywhere in Provo and the surrounding areas.

(If you are interested in a more thorough history of the Y at BYU, I recommend the Wikipedia entry and its related links as a starting point.)

About this shot:

I knew the Y was lit for homecoming, and the hike is a short one and compatible with my family schedule (i.e. I could leave once the kids are in bed and not feel guilty stranding my wife with the kids, and I’d only be robbing myself of sleep). We met in the parking lot of the law library and drove up to the base of the hike.

After gearing up, we started our brisk hike to the top. Carrying a backpack full of camera gear, my tripod, panohead.. etc., we were able to reach the 10th switchback and the trail leading to the base of the Y in about 30 minutes. We passed a couple of groups of young BYU students, but they were busy flirting in large groups so they didn’t seem to mind.

My plan was to shoot the panorama from the middle of the bottom serif of the Y to give something interesting to look at as you pan around. Even though it was a day or two after a new moon and there was hardly any moonlight – there was plenty of light in every direction – about three or four EV more light than I had when I was standing on top of Nebo. I bracketed each shot with 3 exposures to blend together and get more shadow and hilight detail – and merged them all together. It took about 30 minutes to shoot the whole sphere.

That was long enough for several groups to come and go.

Things to look for

If you look to the right of Chris’s shoulder you can see a couple of blurry faces making out, which makes me happy because the Y is also somewhat of a quintessential makeout spot for young college kids – although many of them aren’t ambitious enough to leave the parking lot. (Fair note, the Y isn’t known as a makeout spot – “Squaw Peak” has the honor of being the notorious overlook / makeout spot in the area – so this is probably where people go to make out but not feel so stereotypical in the process).

As you pan around, you can see the entire BYU campus. My car is actually in this shot, but it’s don’t have the supercomputer necessary to stitch the panorama at a resolution large enough for you to zoom in that far – and even if I did it’d be hard to see. The dark spots you see in some of the light trails is a strange artifact of how one of the programs I used handled the differences with moving lights between exposures, but I didn’t want to spend the hours necessary to clean it up.

A couple of guys were also sitting right behind us enjoying watching what we were doing

The links!

Flash version

If the above link doesn’t work, you can view the full 360 panorama of the view from the Y lit at night

iPad / iPod Version

You can use a special HTML5/CSS 3D viewer of the iPad-friendly panorama of the view from BYU Y at night

Android Version

If you are on android, you can use the normal full flash link (as long as you have installed the Flash player on your Android phone) – and if you are side-by-side with an iPhone user you can rub in the fact that yours will zoom in farther since it will dynamically load images as it zooms whereas the HTML5/CSS3D viewer cannot.

Backstory to this shot:

When we realized we couldn’t get to the summit by sunset, we got what we could

If you have read my other post – you already know that we summited Mount Nebo around 11:00PM – about four hours after we had wanted to. This was due in part by getting a start two hours later than we expected and having the hike last a mile longer than we expected, and also because of how much slower we were able to move on the rough terrain by headlamp than we would have by sunlight.

After we had hiked for about an hour the sky started to fade into an orange color and the light started to hit the side of the mountains. That, combined with the first signs of color in the leaves that are starting to change made this a nice spot for a 360 panorama – even though it wasn’t quite the shot we were thinking of when we started out.

The links!

Flash version

If the above link doesn’t work, you can view the full 360 panorama of the view from the hike up Mount Nebo

iPad / iPod Version

You can use a special HTML5/CSS 3D viewer of the iPad-friendly panorama of the view from the hike up Mount Nebo

Android Version

If you are on android, you can use the normal full flash link (as long as you have installed the Flash player on your Android phone) – and if you are side-by-side with an iPhone user you can rub in the fact that yours will zoom in farther since it will dynamically load images as it zooms whereas the HTML5/CSS3D viewer cannot.

While I was in Zion National Park last month, I took several panoramas that I haven’t had time to stitch or post yet. This is one of them. In addition to being the first panorama posted with the updated viewer (it should load much faster than they have previously), this is also the first one that I’m publishing the link for the iPad / iPod version of the panorama viewer.

Backstory to this shot:

One last trip for the 2010 canyoneering season

Chris Raver asked me if I wanted to go do one last canyon in Zion along with a few other guys at the beginning of September. I agreed, and we started the game of trying to pick what to do. We decided on Behunin canyon over The Subway since we’ve done the Subway nigh unto a billion times, and it would be hard to top the conditions we experienced when we did it in May of this year (high flowing water = fun in The Subway if you are prepared and have experience… kind of like I imagine an extra-angry bull is extra fun for a rodeo pro, but would be lethal to a normal guy like me).

Always wanting to stretch the trips out to get the most canyons in that we can in the time we are down there (one trip we were down in Zion for 36 hours and of those hours – all but two of them when we weren’t sleeping were spent canyoneering… we’re pretty efficient and will often bang out more than one in a day). Our favorite nightcap canyon is Keyhole canyon – which we will hit up right as the sun is setting and complete with headlamps and drysuits. This canyon takes only about an hour or two, but it’s a blast at night. Unfortunately, keyhole was out because of construction.

Another fun one to do on the night before or morning after a big trip is Pine Creek. It’s a short canyon – only 3 or so hours long (but much longer if you have a big group) – but it was also closed because of construction. So was Spry canyon, and a number of other good short options.

The plan to do Mystery canyon

Chris suggested that he would go down and sit up all night at the permit window to secure a Mystery canyon permit – and that sounded like a great idea. He drove down Thursday afternoon and sat in the window at the backcountry desk for about 12 hours before it opened (this was labor day weekend). He was the second one in line and he was able to snag the six available Mystery Canyon permits for our group (good work Chris!).

Hmm… No Mystery Canyon

So fast forward to Friday night as we are all sitting around the table at an overpriced eatery in Springdale, UT discussing our plans for the next day. I just talked to my wife who is pregnant and having bad morning sickness, and she said something to the effect of “I would prefer if you would come back early, but do what you want.” When I bring up the fact I’m going to have to bail, suddenly a lot of other people start having excuses as well… and it turns out nobody is really feeling up to Mystery anymore and we all decide to bail. At that point, we probably could have called the backcountry desk to turn in the permit to let someone else go, but our minds were more focused on sleep.

So what does that long backstory have to do with this shot?

Excellent book with lots of photo spots in Utah listed.

“At Sunrise, this is the most beautiful panorama in Zion.”

So, how can you argue with that? Now – he says “panorama” and then shows a clip of basically a 25-degree field-of-view of just the Towers of the Virgin, so perhaps we use the word to mean different things…. but just like I can’t pass up taking a panorama at any place called “panorama point”, I also couldn’t argue with a guy with a name that is spelt like matress and beyond my ability to pronounce.

Now that I’ve got this sunrise panorama out of the way, I’m sure some time that I’m down there I can find one that is more stunning – although I will admit I do like this one. Especially now that I can look at it without feeling my legs aching from hiking the day before.

What you see in the Panorama

From left to right when you first load it, you see the West Temple, the Sundial, the Temple of the Virgin, and the Altar of Sacrifice (the Altar of Sacrifice is easy to see – it has the flat top and the red streak coming down it). As you pan around you see other named stuff, like the Watchman, and the Human History Museum. Some guy in a Ben & Jerry’s shirt was admiring my work while I was there too

The links!

Flash version

If the above link doesn’t work, you can view the full 360 panorama of the Towers of the Virgin at Sunrise in Zion National Park

iPad / iPod Version

You can use a special HTML5/CSS 3D viewer of the iPad-friendly panorama of the Towers of the Virgin in Zion National Park

Android Version

If you are on android, you can use the normal full flash link (as long as you have installed the Flash player on your Android phone) – and if you are side-by-side with an iPhone user you can rub in the fact that yours will zoom in farther since it will dynamically load images as it zooms whereas the HTML5/CSS3D viewer cannot.

Panorama of Mount Nebo at Midnight

This trip was about as last-minute as you can get. We decided to hike to the north peak of Mount Nebo Friday afternoon, and left my house around 4:30 PM and headed towards the Nebo Loop in Payson – planning to stop for food along the way.

It turns out, there is only really one place to get fast food on the road from Spanish Fork to Payson, and once we realized that we had passed it we backtracked to it. It’s a Burger King that is attached to a Chevron station. We place or orders, buy some gatorade and misc stuff, and then head back into the car to head to the trailhead.

Chris drives a TDI Jetta, and he takes great pleasure in getting as many miles out of each drop of diesel that he can. I guess part of getting high mileage must involve keeping your tank really low, because after twenty minutes of driving up the hills on the Nebo Loop, his car informs us we have a range of only 5 miles left. A few more turns later and it’s at 0 miles of range left. The tough part about driving a diesel car is that even if you have the lungs and the hose and the lack of morals that would allow you to siphon gas from someone – you are going to have a hard time finding another vehicle in the middle of the wilderness that takes diesel. Chances are if you find one, it’s pulling a hunting trailer and has a 4:1 gun-to-person ratio… so we decide to turn back and get some diesel in his car. Man… If ONLY we were just at a gas station…

We end up starting our hike about 90 minutes later than we had wanted to, but decided to keep going anyway since the people’s GPS tracks we saw showed it only being 4.5 miles to the summit and we tend to hike at least 2.5 or 3 miles per hour – so we could still make it up there by dusk or shortly afterwards…

I recorded my GPS track of the same route that guy we were following used.

Here’s his track, which shows the route we took but lies about how long it is:

On the west face of the ridge, the wind was blowing strong and was bitterly cold. The moment you crossed over to the east face of the ridge the wind was completely gone. As luck would have it, much of the route is on the west face of the ridge (perhaps because people tend to hike early this in the day, so being in the shade in the summer would be nice, but I’m not convinced that the person who put the trail up originally thought things out much since it has a lot of spots where you go down a few hundred feet only to immediately climb back up that same amount).

We reached the summit and took a few pictures of ourselves with the lights behind us, and then I set up and took a panorama. Normally, I shoot several exposures and blend them for an HDR panorama. In this case, there wasn’t a need for HDR. To avoid spending the entire night up there taking images for the panorama, I cranked up the ISO to 6400 and used 8 second exposures. I shot at F/8 at the hyperfocal distance of the lens because the depth of field is important for these things. The end result is the 360×180 Panorama of Mount Nebo at Midnight – lit by a nearly full moon.

It was extremely windy at the summit, and the wind was very cold – so by the time I was done shooting this I was having a hard time even moving my fingers. Some parts of the panorama are degraded because the wind shook the camera, but overall I think it gives a good impression of what it is like up there at night. It’s a nice view – better than the view durring the day in my opinion. Now… had I know that we wouldn’t be getting back to my house until 4:30 AM – I think we would have hiked something shorter instead.

I really need an Ultrawide Angle lens for this kind of thing. If anyone reading this feels like sending me around eight-hundred bucks, I’ll go buy an UWA lens and I’ll take as many 360×180 panoramas of your house that you want

The LDS Conference Center

I visited Jason after he was done for the day and he stuck around for a while so I could shoot this set of images. All of the lighting people have left for the day, so the lights you see here are just the default work lights. Although I think these lights look just fine, as you pan around you can see how many lights they have that they can work with and it’s easy to imagine what someone with talent could do to make this place look even more amazing.

About the panorama

While you view the panorama of the LDS Conference Center you can click on the amazon MP3 link at the bottom to hear some songs of the Tabernacle Choir singing – I’m not a huge fan of music on web pages, but this is one place I will make an exception since it fits the mood of the building.

About some of the sound equipment

Some of the microphones that are hanging down are used only to generate sound for use in-house. There are a number of thin microphones hanging down that are used to create reverb and make the sound feel more natural to people sitting in different sections of the Conference Center. Though other groups sing on this stage, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is by far the most frequent group performing here. One feature of the stage you will notice is that on the walls there are several large white speakers. These speakers are set up to help the choir hear each other – on the women’s side of the stage, the speakers play a mix of the men’s side and vice versa. By pumping sound out to the choir like this, it replicates the same experience that the choir has naturally signing under the parabolic dome in the nearby Tabernacle.

Some other things to look for

If you are familiar with lighting equipment, you will notice a couple of softboxes in the seating section set up around a chair. If you aren’t familiar with lighting, you will notice a couple of big trapezoid (which are the softboxes). This is where Lloyd Newell recites the Spoken Word portion of Music and the Spoken Word. I’m not sure why the scaffolding is set up there, and there is a cherry-picker out in the back too that is used for cleaning.

Touring the building

The several small groups of people you see in the background are part of guided tours that the church provides for free. If you are ever in Salt Lake City, it would be worth your while to take the tour of this building and several of the nearby buildings. In fact, if you just have a hour-or-two layover at the Salt Lake City Airport – you can even get picked up and taken on some tours and then brought back in time for your flight. (And yes, it is truly free – it’s sponsored by the Church and the Chamber of Commerce, the airlines, and a few other groups)

Count the microphones – win a prize!

It’s also impressive how many microphones there are. If you count them all up and post a guess for how many microphones you think there are on the stage (and hanging over the stage) of the Conference Center, I’ll get Jason to judge and in a week or two the person who is closest will get a personal comment posted from me congratulating them. You can also try to guess how many microphones are in use when they record an episode of Music and the Spoken Word here (which would include any mics on instruments, etc). The person closest with that guess will also win a virtual high-five.

Added bonus: See what Amazon thinks you need to buy today

I don’t want to brag about my wealth, but I’ve made $3 this year from people buying stuff from Amazon. It’s quite exciting. The recommendations in the box below are NOT something that I picked out – but something Amazon picks based on what they think you should buy (or rather, what they think you might be likely to buy). So don’t complain to me if you see something funny going on down there…

Panorama from Panorama Point - Capitol Reef National Park

I couldn’t resist taking a 360×180 Panorama from Panorama Point in Capitol Reef National Park. I took two, one at sunset and another at sunrise. The sunset one I haven’t bothered stitching together because the sky in it is boring (no clouds that night) but this sunrise one I thought came out nice.

The panorama actually looks quite a bit cooler than I remember it being when I was there in person. Perhaps that’s because I spent less than 5 minutes there – and all 5 of those minutes consisted of running from my car up to the spot, setting up the tripod, and shooting 120 different shots (40 different angles, 3 exposures each bracketed 2 stops +/-), then taking down the tripod and running to the car. (We were in a hurry to get to the middle of nowhere to do angel cove canyon)

Early on in Angel Cove Canyon

The first part of Angel Cove Canyon is fairly wide with some occasional downclimbing. When we were there, there was a bunch of knotted rope left behind by an earlier party at each of the drops. I think it is more fun to do canyons where there isn’t a bunch of crap already there from the groups in front of you – part of the fun is figuring out how you want to get down the specific drops. When there are fixed ropes left sitting there it eliminates a lot of the thinking.

The particular area of this shot you can see part of our group going down one of the downclimbs while another part of our group hangs out in the shade of another finger of a canyon coming in from the north.

This is the last of my angel cove 360×180 panoramas. I have plenty more pictures I will post later, most likely on my flickr photostream.

A narrow section of Angel Cove Canyon

Another panorama from Angel Cove canyon – here is a panorama of a narrow section of Angel Cove Canyon. The lighting was pretty cool when I was in this section.

The tripod was set up pretty low when I took these. I set it up because I saw some cool shots from that lower angle. It wasn’t until I stitched this that I realized that a 360×180 taken from such a low perspective gives kind of a leprechaun’s-eye-view of the surroundings. In this case, I think it works out pretty well.

Panorama of the final rappels of Angel Cove

Here is a Panorama of Angel Cove’s Final Rappels. I did it this saturday with Chris Raver, his friend Brad, and my wife’s three younger brothers.

The final two rappels consist of back-to-back rappels off of natural anchors. (You can see the second pile of rocks that starts the second rappel if you look down a bit)

As you can see, the canyon opens up quite wide for these final two rappels. As you set up, you have a nice view of the other side of the Dirty Devil river. It’s in this general area that Butch Cassidy and other outlaws would hang out in the late 1800′s.

Flash-floods feed the Dirt Devil

This weekend I visited Capitol Reef National Park with family for on Friday, and then on Saturday I went out to a remote area near Hanksville and did Angel Cove canyon with my wife’s younger brothers.

We picked the canyon with the chance of afternoon thunderstorms in mind because it is a relatively short canyon (some refer to it as a “Micro Slot”) taking only 3 to 6 hours and only having between 5 to 7 rappels in the canyon. As we exited the canyon it started to sprinkle on us, and as we neared the top of a slickrock dome the clouds opened up and it started to pour. From the moment it started raining heavily until the time we started to see trails of water was mere minutes, and it was between 10 to 20 minutes from when the rain started getting heavy to when we were able to see a number of drainages fill up and start flowing.

After watching the waterfalls for a minute or two, I could no longer resist the temptation to get out there and capture it as best I could. Working fast and in pretty bad conditions I set up and took a 20-image 260-degree single-row panorama of the area. Water spots and drops on my lens were unavoidable given the conditions (blowing heavy rain coming from every direction as the winds shifted around) – but I was able to have enough overlap between my images that I could get rid of all the waterspots in the final image.

If you are asking yourself “Gee, this is cool… but why not a 360×180?” allow me to let you ponder what happens when you try to shoot a camera at any angle greater than 0 degrees when it is raining… There simply was no way I could have shot one until after the storm had passed, and these waterfalls are as quick to disappear as they are to appear so I wanted to make sure I caught them. They did stick around for a little while and I could have gotten a slightly better shot after the rain let up – but after putting the weather resistance of the 7D to the test with the downpour I subjected it to, my camera had earned itself a bit of a break. (That, and condensation was starting to get to it so I pulled the battery to help prevent it from getting damaged)

The resolution of the final image is 19171 x 5356. If I were to print this out on 17-inch wide paper, it would be 5-feet long at full 300-dpi resolution. I stitched and retouched it at full resolution. If anyone reading this wants to buy a print that size, let me know and we can work something out. I know some places I can print them that big – but you’ll be on your own for framing it!

Rhett's first Jack-o-Lantern

I’m not quite sure why we never carved a pumpkin with him in the past, but it’s probably because of his short attention span. He had fun (helping) carve it, and I had fun freezing my butt of taking a few pictures of it.

Happy Halloween!

(After three clicks and you get to see the big picture).