BoA shoot: Part 3 of 3 - the 12th-story roof (plus the aforementioned 10th-story, 11-image photo stitch)
These last nine pictures are numbered 17-25. All photos can be clicked to enlarge.
17. This shows Moore St leading to the Bergen County Courthouse and River St leading to the new World Trade Center building (1WTC). You can also see part of the old Record building on the left, the Court St Bridge crane, and the Church on the Green steeple.
18. For years, one goal has always been in my mind if I ever got the chance to shoot from the top of this building. There's an old late-20s/early-30s postcard I used to own that showed Main St south to the Courthouse, as taken from the top of the Peoples Trust building. I hadn't seen any similar images since, so I wanted to recreate it.
I thought the card might be in the HackensackNow database, but it isn't. Two days after I shot the picture that follows this one, Al found this image for me in another database. It appears to be from the late-40s/early-50s.
19. Going strictly by memory, this is what I came up with in an effort to recreate that old postcard. I hope we come across that old card one day to do a real comparison.
20. Because my image and the 40s/50s one were different sizes, I resized mine to be as close as possible to the older one for comparative purposes and had to shrink both to make them side-by-side, so you can't click and enlarge this one.
It's obvious from looking at the courthouse's placement vs. the horizon that the older photo was taken from either the 10th-story roof or even from an office window a floor or so below that.
21. In this image, my building appears to be the referee between the Presbyterians/Baptists (barely visible) and the Catholics/Reformed.
The Board of Education building, 5 Pangborn Pl, and 40 Passaic St all sit at ringside.
22. This shows the Municipal Complex, the back of the Post Office, Central Ave, Union St, a bit of the high school, and some of the high-rises.
23. Turning northeasterly, we see the Ramapo Mountains, the Hackensack River splitting the FDU campus/University Plaza buildings and flowing under the Anderson St Bridge (the Rothman Center is just above the middle of the bridge), the back section of the YMCA, part of the Giant Farmers Market, the soon-to-vanish Oritani Field Club, McDonald's, and - if you look real hard - White Manna.
24 - You know I just HAD to get a shot of Enlightenment directing air traffic into Teterboro. From home (only 7 floors up), the planes' underbellies appear to get tickled by the torch.
I'm not sure what all the activity in the background is about. Capping Meadowlands landfills?
25. OK - the big finale (best-viewed at a monitor resolution of 1024x768).
I like doing these photo stitches, but unless conditions are ideal, they either don't line up well or don't work at all. And the more pictures you use, the greater chance there is of failure. 3-5 images aren't too difficult, but this monster has 11. Doing it hand-held makes it nearly impossible to guess where the previous shot lines up. You always have to include some overlap in each shot so the program has similarities to line up and stitch together.
To have a chance of getting it right, you really have to stand and rotate in one spot throughout. If you have obstructions that you have to clear by moving over a couple of feet, you might think you're OK if the horizon still lines up, but what happens is the close objects' position changes much more than that of the distant ones and the program has to make some weird choices.
This is all a big buildup excuse to say that, YES - there are vertical glitches galore, but they're more evident in the lower parts where the closest objects are.
By FAR, the worst of these glitches takes place on Moore St near the end of the stitch: as you head north from the Courthouse, Moore St suddenly ends at Mercer St because the two corner buildings on the north side of that intersection have been sort of brought together by a confused program (my fault - I had to change my position).
Fortunately, all the important stuff in the top half of the total image came out OK, so I deem this a successful stitch.............VERY successful, considering it was hand-held through 11 photos and still lined up quite well.
When I put the stitch into another program to add the copyright watermark, the image window was only about 8 or 9 inches long for the entire stitch, so I used the tiniest letters available in that program. Unfortunately, when the stitch is opened, the watermark becomes the size of a billboard, but at least it doesn't obscure anything important.
I guesstimate this to be about a 300º image. The missing part of the circle would have contained the hospital and the Municipal Complex, but just about everything else that was shown and discussed in the previous two dozen pictures I've already posted is found in this almost-omnidirectional image.............plus Anderson Park, the high-rises in Fort Lee /Cliffside Park, Foschini Park, midtown Manhattan, and the newly-installed solar panels covering the roof of the Ice House (the sun makes ice and the bill is cut by 20%!).
Something you might find interesting in this stitch: you can see the Hackensack River from just south of Rt 4 all the way to just past Rt 80. Personally, I'm blown away by the length of the bend (Kipps Bend) in the river just south of Anderson St, because from my living room, my view of the bend over the last 23 years is direct and compacted - it looks like a big pond from here.
It would be nice to have photographed all this a week or two earlier when the Fall colors were at their peak, but the loss of the leaves lets you see more of the river.
Maybe if I'm a good boy, they'll invite me back next year to photograph Hackensack's colorful foliage from this great vantage point.
