Tags
360 degree photographs, Berkeley, CA, GoogleEarth photo cars, Sara Frucht's paintings, Telegraph Avenue
Google Earth and WordPress are my favorite programs. Twelve years ago I was in the Berkeley PC computer user club which in a city dominated by Macs was being a bit out of contact with local reality. But, be that as it was – I did a few things which were interesting to that little gaggle of PC users. One of which was making a street view of Telegraph Avenue from our computer hang out up to UC Berkeley campus. Everyone was enthuastic about them and wanted me to make these pictures of every street in the world. They didn’t realize how much work it was to make each of these single pictures by hand. It took eight to twelve hours for each of them. Long since then Google worked out ways of doing it automatically and usually getting much better results. The last rendition of that effort is still posted on the front page of my old web site Virtually Berkeley — 1999. You can go there and click the 360° views to see lots more of those decade old photos. Click them a second time to make them bigger.
This is a composite photograph made from pictures taken from across the street and then combined together to make this picture. I made these for both sides of the street for several blocks and some of them you could click the store and go inside.
This composite photo was taken by running out into the center of the intersection between red lights to get about a dozen photos from which I made this 360 one. As it turned out my friend George Pauly was standing waiting for the light on the far right. The view here has changed very little in 12 years but Cody’s book store has been long abandoned and La Fiesta has moved up Haste street way behind the big rainbow on the front of Amoeba Music store. You can see the present view at Google Earth (at 37.866, -122.2586 ) check the [] Street View box to see much more than what is pictured below.
Today after a preview of my portrait being painted by Sara Frucht I walked back to the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station and passed this incredible scene. The local lair of the Google Earth photo cars.
Notice the strange contraption on top of the car, it’s the compound set of cameras that make those cool street photos while the thing at the top is the earth coordinates locator which no doubt tags every photo with the latitude and longitude of the photo. There were at least two other cars rigged up with these cameras on their roofs. In standard Google Earth tradition I blurred out their faces and in Abu Ghraib tradition I blurred out their genital regions.