The Civils Side of Life

This time last month I had just started a most enjoyable 2 week break in Brittany, France with my family. With my Aunt & Uncle having the enviable job of spending several months each year as reps for holiday camp, we got to spend our time in the Yelloh! Village Camping in Bénodet – Le Port de Plaisance.

Bénodet is situated on the mouth of the river Odet, with a large sweeping beach. With a strong sense of tradition this town is everything you can imagine about Brittany. We spent many an evening strolling along the river into the town, soaking in the relaxed and friendly surroundings. It was impossible not to unwind and let yourself forget all the deadlines and hectic lifestyle that we take as the norm in our daily work lives.

Although we had a couple of days of changable weather we were lucky enough to have the majority of our break basking in glorious sunshine and clear blue skies. Yes, one of us forgot to apply the correct dosage of sun cream but to save any embarrasment I shall not be naming him, he knows who he is.

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Over at the GigaPan website they have a dynamic front page that features panoramas from a user created, themed collection. These change periodically and can have pretty much any theme you could want, from panoramas created on a specific day, panoramas of an area to those associated with a public holiday.

Having returned from a pleasant few days away over the bank holiday I checked in on the world of GigaPans and was surprised to see my Armed Forces Memorial panorama staring right back at me. Thanks to Jeffrey Baker my panorama had been listed along with 37 other images as part of his ‘memorial day gigapans‘ collection to commemorate Memorial Day, a national holiday in the US marked on the last Monday of May.

To suggest your own collections of featured panoramas you first need to be a registered user of the GigaPan website, registration is free. Then send an email to illah [at] ri.cmu.edu with the following information;

• name of collection,
• curator user name (you),
• id numbers of panoramas separated by comma.

Example
Lego
cidodd
542,4964,4983,4985,10993,11033,11160,22300

Just a quick post to add to my slowly expanding set of GigaPans.

I intend to give you a more in depth account of my more significant and/or interesting GigaPans. However from time-to-time I will give you a quick look at other panoramas that I have taken. You can always check out the GigaPan website to keep up-to-date with the latest creations.

The GigaPan website has been created to enable people and communities to come together through images that have so much detail that they themselves are the objects of exploration. Create yourself an account and you can upload images, over 50 MegaPixels, of your own. The real aim is to create massive images, with the robotic mount now available for a range of cameras you can take 1000′s of images and combine them to produce panoramas of a GigaPixel (1000 MegaPixels) and more. Since I purchased the original robotic mount at the start of the year I’ve slowly got used to the new style of photography and some of the quirks of stitching the large number of images into one panorama.

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