wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Energy, Security...and file size limits
Brooks Leffler 2005-Oct-14 17:25:00
Security got in the way of my shooting a pano for the Energy theme, twice. And WWP's file
size limits led me to an approach I haven't seen used here before.
The easiest subject for me would have been the Moss Landing power plant, California's
largest, which is right up the road. At Landis' urging (nothing ventured, nothing gained,
he said) I contacted Duke Energy in Texas to see if I could take a kite aerial pano of their
huge stacks, but was not at all surprised that they wanted nothing to do with pictures,
indoors or out.
Wanting to do something different (and hopefully devoid of security issues), I searched the
web for leads to something I'd read about earlier in the newspaper: a methane digester,
that makes electricity out of cow manure.
One of the pilot projects is at a dairy on the rolling Marin County hills overlooking
beautiful Tomales Bay. The family that owns it was delighted with the idea, but has had
problems in the past with unwelcome visitors to the family home, which is right next to
the digester. So they have a policy of no pictures of the house. Two down.
However, they were happy to give me contact info that led me to the largest dairy
operation in the country, in the middle of California's central valley. It is flat,
photographically-boring terrain, compared to Tomales Bay, but with a huge 7-acre
digester right in the middle of it. Soon I had a very positive, welcoming response from the
CEO of Joseph Farms, which led to a personally-guided tour and an hour of his time
onsite, and a successful shoot. No wind, so it couldn't be done from a kite, but successful
nonetheless.
Methane digestion can't be captured in one photo, IMO, so I shot two panos, hoping that I
could cram them both into the space available and link them with hot spots. Too big for
WWP. So I hit on the idea of posting the second pano on my own site and linking to both
small and large images with hot spots created in CubicConnector. I'm quite pleased with
the result, which easily came in within WWP file-size limits.
You can see the results at http://geoimages.berkeley.edu:16080/wwp905/fullscreen/
BrooksLeffler.html .
bgl