Gigapanties

Me and Chris had scheduled unknowingly our Gigapan shoot on our spring break. The shock on our faces when we looked at each other as Prof. Britos reminded us of it. We didn't want to spend our spring break doing any schoolwork or any work for that matter.

Prof. Britos i had suggested a bunch of different places to Prof. Britos such as the my friends place that over Paololo Valley which overlooked the the views of Waikiki and the ocean something that was overdone many times before and i had also suggested the Pali lookout which was a bit of a hike. Me and Chris didn't really feel like a hike so i had suggested that we do the view of the Ala Wai taking the pictures from the McCully brigde because it had not been done before. Me and Chris agreed it was a great idea.

So we set up to meet our teacher in school. To our surprise the professor was dressed to hike the Pali with a water bottle, hiking shoes and all. I assumed there was some sort of miscommunication because we were dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. I still think that the professor did it on purpose so that we would take pictures of the Pali instead. He agreed to look at the Ala Wai to see if we could shoot it there. I thought for sure we were going to shoot the Ala Wai. As soon as we got to the Ala Wai the professor said no it's not going to work. "Go get your stuff. We're going to the Pali". Me and Chris stared blankly at each other. Hung over and disorientated we were sure we would die on the treacherous 10 minute hike up the Pali. Heavy heartedly we changed into our hiking gear. We droved to the Pali in his black pimping BMW 5 series with a choice of a bad pop radio station.

We got to the Pali and thank god we saw that it was cloudy. So there was no real point of climbing all the way up. Anyway below the Pali it was windy and me and Chris(who both hate cold weather) were freezing our balls off. I couldn't imagine how cold it would be up there. So we started off setting up the camera following his instructions closely. We put his camera on and started to configure the gigapan unit. We picked our highest point and our lowest point. The gigapan showed us that we need 1120 pictures to be taken. While we waited for the pictures to be taken the professor told us about the gigapan project. Interestingly it involved a lot of high profile organizations such as Nasa, National Geographic and Google. He told us that he had been invited by Gigapan.org and they gave the beta unit to him. He decided to get HPU involved and made it apart of his class curriculum.

I was surprised to see what a huge project this was before this i had just taken this project pretty lightly because really i didn't think anyone would care. As he gave us further information especially on the future uses of our projects i began to be more interested. The HPU gigapan pictures that we took are also going to be featured in a our media festivals and will be printed our as artwork. I felt a little remorse on not taking this more seriously but felt better that we had chosen to go up to the Pali.

The Britos also gave us a brief history of the Pali to keep us from getting bored. The Great Battle of Nu'uanu had taken place there. It was the bloodiest battle of Hawaii where Kamehameha 1 had taken over the island of Oahu. The King's opposition, some 400 of them were driven off the ridge to their painful deaths. After story time Britos sent us away to do some fieldwork. When we came back he told us that an undercover policeman talked to him and said he was there looking for robbers. At least we know the cops are doing their jobs because our friend's car was broken into the day before. Britos also told us the police officer told him an old man of about 80 fell to his death trying to get his hat that was blew off in the wind. There is a lesson here people. Buy a new hat. Even in the old man's death other people had to risk their lives as the fireman had to hike and recover his body something that was not as easy to do in that given terrain.

We had a hitch at the last part of the gigapan shoot when the camera got stuck but Britos went back and adjusted it. He told us that a program would stitch all the photos together and give us one large picture. Me and Chris had a lot of fun that day and were glad we put in a bit more effort into this project. I also am thankful that Britos took time out of his spring break as well to help us out with the project.

At the end our picture looks pretty good when compared to Annabelle's "Nuclear Holocaust Makapuu" and that our gigapan picture ended up in the top 10 surprisingly.