There's a bumper sticker that's current in Westport, Massachusetts that reads "Welcome to Westport - Now go Home." It was quoted to us by a friendly couple made curious by the oversized tripod we'd set up in front of the Harbormaster's shack at Westport Point. They smiled as they said it. They probably smile as they say it to the people who come to visit them in their summer cottage. It's not exactly a friendly thing to say but it is humorous and not entirely unfriendly depending on how it's delivered. Mostly it speaks to the truth of Westport's great natural (and for the most part) uncrowded beauty and the fact that people who've learned to enjoy it hope against hope to keep it that way. This couple had the look of summer residents. Let's hope that year round residents smile as they say it to couples like this one who come to stay during the summer. We like to think of people smiling.
There's quite a few strata in Westportian society. They don't always smile at eachother. They don't often mix at all except at town meetings and then they're sharing space and not really mixing. There are the full time working residents of Westport. They fish and farm and serve you food in restaurants which is not to say there aren't a few lawyers, doctors and financiers among them. Mostly, they build their nests for year 'round residence and send their kids to school.
Then there are the summer residents that keep second homes there and those who've even retired and decided to make it their first home. They have lots of money by local standards and generally don't have kids to put through local schools. Their kids are off at Andover or Princeton or Geneva International Boarding School for Children of the Rich and Well Monied.
Finally, there are the tourists that pack the inns and hotels or wrangle a room in a relative's cottage. The groups and their concerns are different. Go figure. They don't always get along and things get heated in the local political arena. You probably don't need to know all of that though if you're packing your bags in preparation for a visit there. It's just a backdrop. Come let the sun warm your skin and buy one of those bumper stickers if it makes you laugh.
Our visit to the working harbor at Westport Point had its genesis years ago. My wife lived there and was at least a temporary member of the local residents tribe though she never got the secret tattoo. I've often suspected her of lifetime membership. I've seen the wistful looks when we visit so I've looked everywhere for the tattoo and failed to find it. It's not there "on the flesh" but it may be buried somewhere deeper. We married at the church up the road from the harbor and had our rehearsal dinner at the Paquachuck Inn which figures quite nicely in the photo. She lived for years in the little apartment in the harbormaster's house just up the road. The tidy little shack in the foreground is where he conducts his business to this day. (www.westport-ma.com/harbormaster)
It's just a shack though, go full screen and spin around to the south. The stars of the show are the fishing boats. You'll find them in every size and shape, tailored to their use and done up in rich shades of red and green. Feel the warm sun on your face. Feel the welcoming breeze on your skin .... and then .... go home!
We haven't told you enough of the story of Save the Bay's assault on Gooseneck Cove. It's not just about one new culvert on Ocean Ave. It's a good deal more. There were three major obstacles to tidal flow in Gooseneck Cove: Ocean Ave and its inadequate culvert to Fishermen's Cove, a dam about halfway back and Hazard Road with no culvert at all near the back of the cove. Save the Bay took care of all three obstacles during their renovation project.
Part of the credit goes to the town of Newport. Newport realized that they could shorten emergency response times to part of their town by improving Hazard road in order to allow the safe passage of emergency vehicles. Instead of strangling STB's efforts with red tape, Newport picked up part of the cost to raise and pave the road in question, adding the culvert to improve tidal flow as a matter of course. Now the salt water courses in under Hazard Road, carrying seaweed, crabs and the occasional soggy politician pointing out the benefits of cooperation as he passes. You have to stand up and cheer when bureaucracies and organizations do smart things. So often they don't and leave the common man scratching his head in disbelief.
So, with more of the story to tell with our pictures, we went back to a location on the west side of Hazard Road near the new culvert to take a photograph that would show the area most affected by the project, ie. the area most relieved of the invasive phragmites grass "downstream" (from the standpoint of the incoming tide) of Hazard Road. We arrived at our spot at 8am on a Saturday morning. Low tide had occurred around 5am. High tide was due in at 11. My efforts at setting up the tripod were slightly hampered by our soggy location. Our endpoint in time loomed. The tide was going to get our feet wet within the hour. Chris booted his pc and switched on all the equipment that allow the camera to talk to the computer.
When everything was communicating I lifted the camera and its mount into place on the tripod and began to hoist. In my haste, I nearly overhoisted. The camera and its mount teetered dangerously towards the marsh with two of the poles nested only an inch or so. Chris gasped and my adrenaline responded in time to correct the situation without mishap.... note to self: add warning stripe of red paint to show limit of travel.
With the camera 30' up and stable despite the slight breeze, Chris began the automated process controlled by our software friend "Pappy Wizard." The mount moved and then stalled. The furrows on Chris' brow deepened. The camera came down. A few switches were flipped. The camera went up and he restarted the process. Pappy wasn't happy and we didn't know why. Pappy is young. He can't always tell us where it hurts and sometimes collapses in a heap without warning. Even a short nap in the way of a restart doesn't always help.
The tide came rushing in, cheered by all onlookers. We broke down our equipment and packed it away without really knowing if we had all of the images we'd need to create a panorama. You know we did because you see it above with all of the fascinating shapes and colors that flowing water, sand and marsh grasses can create.
With the equipment packed away we had time to chat with the natives. Jack Kelly surfaced as our insider's guide to Gooseneck Cove. He filled our ears with facts about what had transpired here, many of which found their way into this blog entry. He informed us of the presence of a Yellow Throated Night Heron down the road. Chris replies that his father's favorite bird had always been the Rosy Breasted Pushover. Clearly a friend to humans, many of Jack's friends now wear feathers and fur. He comes to the cove to feel his stress go out with the tide and points out the blue crab stalking its prey near the culvert's exit. Jack takes pictures and uses them to tell the tale of "Larry the Buck." While the big bucks crash heads, Larry sneaks in and finds out he's just what the doe was looking for, a lesson that can be applied to life, love and the pursuit of business if you care to.
Fisherman's Cove is idyllic. On the list of New England's most idyllic places, there's maybe Rockport, Massachusetts and then Fisherman's Cove in Newport and then, I don't know, your grandmother's cottage in East Sandwich. Fisherman's Cove has fishermen and their boats to start with: authentic fishermen fresh off their authentic boats and they'll show off their authentic harvest of striped bass if you ask them nicely. There's also plenty of rocks. It wouldn't really be a New England shoreline scene without them. So rocks are essential and this place has them. They're craggy and black and the seaweed clings to them like their little seaweed lives depend on it and it probably does. There's a road curving idyllically by it and summer houses perched like sentinels anywhere the land rises high enough to afford a view or enough height above sea level to avoid the highest of high tides. Fishermen's Cove is idyllic and I'm really wasting my time and yours trying to describe just how idyllic because if a picture is worth a thousand words then the high definition spherical panorama above is worth well over 10 million.
When we took this photograph, we'd just finished taking a similar one a few hundred yards away, across the road in Gooseneck Cove. Gooseneck Cove is not quite as high on the idyllic meter as Fishermen's. It lacks those authentic fishermen for one thing. They can't get their authentic boats into it because despite the fact that the two coves are connected by water, the water flows through two culverts and their boats don't fit through them. Imagine it this way: the open ocean (open at least until you run into Long Island) connected to Fishermen's Cove connected to Gooseneck Cove.
I mention the culverts because they're really important as culverts go. These culverts, especially the new one which affords a more direct line for water to travel between the two coves is so important that important people like Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island know all about it. He could probably describe in some detail the impact that this particular culvert is having on the ecosystem of this particular cove, not because he's an expert on such matters but because he was recently involved in creating the political will and financial wherewithal to bring this particular culvert into existence. It's an important culvert.
The idea to add this culvert came from one of the world's most successful environmental organizations, Rhode Island's own Save the Bay. They rock as environmental orgs go. They bend the ears and twist the arms of people like Senator Jack Reed for one and call it advocacy for one. They take school children out on the bay and dump live sea critters into their laps and call it education for another. As if that's not enough, they spend a great deal of effort planting eelgrass and monitoring its return in places like Gooseneck Cove and call it restoration. They really should be describing their three pronged approach to saving the bay themselves. Visit their website and let them tell you all about it .... but back to the story of our new culvert.
Why a new culvert? Not to put too fine a scientific point on it, the culvert lets in more sea water. The sea water makes life uncomfortable for the invasive phragmites grass choking the cove. Phragmites slowly turns the cove from a thriving complex ecosystem into a wet equivalent of a cornfield, pretty and green and consisting only of grass and a few red winged blackbirds. Build a culvert. The salt water enters. The phragmites goes away. The eelgrass come back with a little help from Save the Bay and their happy legions of eelgrass volunteers and before you know it all of the little creatures that like to live in eelgrass come back as well. Job done! Cove restored! Fishermen, tourists and photographers flock and Senator Jack Reed runs for reelection on an environmental platform.
We did it! We pushed our 50' tripod into the sky to capture an unforgettable image of the facade of St. Anne's church in Fall River, MA. We screwed our robotic mount and camera into the top pole and sent it into the sky to see the world from a bird's eye view. It wasn't the eye of an eagle, more that of a songbird in the tree tops but no matter .... we were high enough to live up to the aerial part of our name: "Aerial Vr" and it felt fine.
We set up in Kennedy Park behind a row of trees which border the park and lifted our camera high enough to see over them and capture the entire facade of St. Anne's Church down to the steps. We had to work quickly to use the warm rosy light from the setting sun that illuminates the stone of St. Anne's facade to such good effect at this time of day. The tripod went up easily enough with the legs adjusted to plumb the center pole. We screwed the camera and its robotic mount into the center poles and began to slide them upwards, clamping as we went. Everything went quite smoothly up to this point.
We'd attached nylon rope to a collar at the top in the hope of guying the top of our contraption to the legs of the tripod. As the camera went upwards it became obvious that our pole wasn't stiff enough near the top and that our arrangement of guy ropes had to be altered. The camera began to sway back and forth in the light breeze and though breakage or toppling seemed very unlikely it was nerve racking to see our expensive equipment sway through space 40' or more above the ground. We scurried around with our ropes and were relieved to find that if we backed into the breeze until the rope formed an angle of 30-45 degrees with the pole that the arrangement began to stabilize.
We "pulled the trigger" on our pc and soon had the 8 images that we could stitch into a virtual reality photograph. You see the result of our efforts above. I feel safe in saying that the beauty of St Anne's, an amazing song in stone and one of Fall River's iconic buildings has never been celebrated from that particular vantage point. Spin the image around and look downwards and you can see the baseball game going on in the corner of Kennedy Park. The sweep of the park down to the head of Mount Hope Bay with the Braga Bridge behind is somewhat obscured by light. The vastly differing amounts of light encountered as one turns towards and then away from the setting sun taxed even our electronically enhanced ability to compensate for huge contrasts within a single image. Still, the park and the church and the lovely experience it provides the residents of Fall River on a warm summer evening is there in our virtual reality image. I think the park's designer, Frederick Law Olmstead would be pleased.
Our equipment made a few people curious. A 6 year old boy stood looking upwards, full of questions. The baseball coach from the game came over to retrieve him and ask what we were doing. Fall River born and raised, he made it clear he liked to see his city's most beautiful locations celebrated this way. He'd done his share of surfing the web as well and had already seen the "Street View" panoramas that can be found in Google Earth." I explained that our work was similar but of a much higher quality and resolution. Most of the panoramas we do can also be found using Google Earth. Simply turn on the 360 Cities layer that appears in the tree on the left of the page under the heading of "Gallery." Navigate on the map to Fall River and the panoramas we've done will appear as red circles with "360" inside of them. A click on the circle icons brings up the panorama. Be sure to try "full screen" for the full affect!
It's been a few weeks of interesting technical achievements and setbacks here at Aerial Vr. It's time to let you in on part of our technical journey.
The good news first .... Chris has put his mechanical design talents to good use developing one of the world's largest camera tripods. We'll soon put a camera with its robotic remote controlled mount 50 feet in the air with perhaps a half hour of man-effort. We're proud of this of course but we're not strutting around like a north Korean with a nuclear missile either. This is not rocket science. It's also a problem that anyone with money can solve. There are collapsible tripods that will lift a camera up that high on the market already and Google will be glad to help you find them. Just get ready to drop a couple grand down your equipment hole before you lift a camera up into the sky.
We're proud because Chris did it for under $500. He's not going to tell every camera buff on the internet how either. We'll just say that he did it with an assortment of commercially available nesting fiberglass poles, some clamping blocks, some angle iron, a few nuts and bolts and hose clamps and a good drill press. The legs all collapse alongside the center pole to create a bundle 10' long and a foot or so in diameter and just light enough for one strong man to carry a 100 feet before collapsing on the pavement. It can be divided into two bundles and carried by 2 men a good deal further in a pinch, or so we hope. We don't want to have heart attacks and we don't want to hire porters. They're both expensive in Rhode Island.
We can let you in on a few more of the general operational parameters of the tripod. It doesn't have a crank. Someone needs to stand on a 6' ladder in order to mount the camera and slide it upwards into the sky one 10' pole and one clamp at a time. Finally and importantly, it will need to be guyed and sandbagged in order to go much beyond 20' into the air safely. We plan to guy it from somewhere near the top with nylon cord, probably down to its own 4 feet for simplicity. A couple of sandbags on the base should keep it stable in a light wind. I said "should." We have yet to lift it skywards with any weight on it. If we had a rocket scientist on staff we'd ask him to calculate how much weight it would take to stabilize our tripod in a 10 mph wind given our 50' max height and our 4 feet arranged in a circle 14' in diameter. It's not that we're not safety conscious or good engineers. It's that we had to lay off our rocket scientist last week due to the economy. We'll just ask our loved ones to stand clear, say a prayer and hoist away. It may not be how you put someone on the moon but it's a time honored experimental approach. It worked for the Wright Brothers. It will work for us too.
But it's not about having the biggest tripod on the block ... not really. Our palms sweat and our pulse quickens when we think about what sort of images we might capture with this marvelous contraption. We're thinking about catching the lovely curve of a coastline from up there or the majestic sweep of lawn leading up to a mansion or two down in Newport. We have a series of public service panoramas planned that will allow us to realize these ambitions without having to waste good time negotiating a paycheck. We hope to photograph Save the Bay's very green and solar panel bedecked roof using it. We may even have enough altitude to hoist the camera in the parking lot north of their building and get a view of their saltmarsh south of it. We hope to use it to photograph the front of their south facing building in the clear morning light. We also hope to capture unforgettable images of two of Fall River's iconic architectural structures: St. Anne's church and Durfee Highschool. If we have our way or should I say "if we're able to realize our ambition" then soon people from Tokyo to Taiwan will be studying these two remarkably beautiful stone facades and planning their vacations accordingly. I hyperbolize in order to amuse but the telling fact remains. We'll be using our new tripod to realize the aerial part of our name in the next few weeks or we'll collect a few bruises and a sprained back in the attempt.
But it's not one achievement after another here at Aerial Vr. We've collected our lumps as well. We won't play our violin too loudly or plaintively but this is one hell of a complicated way to take a picture. On a bad day it will send you running for your insta-matic. The lens on our digital SLR has to "talk" to our camera if you please. (We used to happy if the lens let light through. Now it has to talk and perhaps more to the point be heard.) The camera has to talk to our usb hub. The hub has to talk to our "hot spot" radio frequency gadget. The hotspot has to talk to our laptop's network card. Once inside our pc, the line of communication is more or less safe, (as safe as anything running in one of Bill Gates' creations can be) still, at least 4 pieces of software have to be opened in the correct order and dozens of operational parameters set properly in order to take the series of photographs that will become a virtual reality panorama.
One of the software programs is called Pappy Wizard. The Wizard talks to the robotic camera mount we call Ansel. It talks through the same cards, hubs and hotspots as our camera. The Wizard and Ansel communicate just fine as long as the phone lines don't go down. There are a half dozen batteries, a half dozen electrical and usb connections and about 100 ways that the whole contraption can refuse to work. The Wizard is very clever at aiming our camera with the help of Ansel's servos but don't think of Captain Picard saying "make it so!" There's a whole engineering department working hard to realize his orders. The wizard needs to be informed about the camera and lens. Everything from the lens' focal length to the camera's array type (there are 3) need to be entered correctly before Ansel and the Wizard can be set on their happy robotic way to capturing overlapping images.
All this to tell you that we went out recently with high photographic hopes and we came up short. Our Tokina lens wouldn't talk to our camera. It needs an adjustment that only the chiropractors at Tokina can provide. A second lens' focal length had to corrected due to our camera's array size. The Wizard needed to be informed of that fact and wasn't. So it was a swing and a miss. We came home without the prize we sought but just a little wiser and a little more determined to bring it home next time. Stay tuned to this station. We'll have some amazing virtual reality photos from high off the ground for people to enjoy in the next few weeks or our name isn't Aerial Vr.
This is the blog of Aerial Vr (www.aerialvr.com). We create virtual reality photographs for viewing on the web. We also send our cameras into the sky on a variety of kites and blimps to see the world from a bird's eye view. We're blogging about our experiences as this exciting new technology and the market around it develops. We're also dedicated to developing a resource for visitors to the Narragansett Bay & Southcoast areas so that they can explore in virtual reality before they come. Try the links above to see all of the content we present in this blog, especially the "Vr Map" link which presents information with a Google map as starting point. "Home" will bring up several recent posts. Or page downwards and try the "Labels" or "Blog Archives" to bring up blog posts and panoramas from our expanding portfolio that fall within a given category. Fair Winds!
