Author Topic: The first-ever view of Hackensack from the top of the Sears tower  (Read 7245 times)

Offline BLeafe

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.......or so I surmise.

Sears has been there for 80 years and I've never seen a single photo from up there and there are no photos from the tower in the City database.

This shoot was the result of months just trying to find the proper person in Sears' corporate echelon with whom to discuss permission and then negotiate an agreement.

Thanks go to attorney William McCormick at Sears Holdings in Hoffman Estates, IL, for working with me to arrange this shoot, which was to serve as "before" photos in advance of the rehab project.

As it turns out, I should have gone much earlier in the day to get the sun shining on the west side of Main St, so I'm kind of disappointed. Time was also lost in actually getting to the tower's open space up by that flag pole. There were multiple tiny iron staircases and ladders to climb and one led to an absolutely pitch-black area, so I had to go all the way back down to the store and find someone with a flashlight who knew where the lights were.

Perhaps Mr. McCormick will let me go back for a reshoot next fall so I can time the illumination better while also capturing Hackensack's colorful fall foliage. I'm pretty sure the rehab won't begin by then.

This "photo" is actually a stitch of 8 hand-held photos that I hoped would line up properly. Although there are a couple of minor glitches, the program did a pretty good job.

Click on the image to enlarge and scroll away.





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Offline Homer Jones

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Re: The first-ever view of Hackensack from the top of the Sears tower
« Reply #1 on: May 18, 2012, 03:52:09 PM »
Great shooting! Your next mission, should you decide to accept it, is to head up to Prospect Ave. and find an owner of a high rise who will give you access to the roof of one of the buildings. That would be a wild panorama with the mountains to the west and NYC to the east.

Offline BLeafe

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Re: The first-ever view of Hackensack from the top of the Sears tower
« Reply #2 on: May 20, 2012, 05:00:31 PM »
I'd love to shoot from up there, but permission will always be a problem. You may remember that I tried to go through some hi-rise owners last year when I wanted to make their tenants aware of the photo I took that showed their buildings and lightning. Every one of them stonewalled me.

It would also be problematic to get the east and west views in the same stitch. I have to stand and turn in one spot every time I do a stitch or else things won't line up properly. The building would have to be replaced by that spire of a rock that that woman climbs in the CitiCard commercial to accomplish that and I wouldn't DARE go up on that thing.

To do the high-rise thing properly, I'd have to shoot the west view in the morning and the east view in the afternoon, so that each is sunlit adequately. If anybody reading this lives in one of those buildings and has an idea about how I can cut the red tape and get on the roof, let me know.

I'll be posting two other stitches from the Sears tower to complete the circle, but the 3 stitches can't be combined into one 360º view because each stitch was shot at a different focal length. When you see pictures that appear the same in different stitches, they're not - each stitch is a completely different set of images shot at different focal lengths.

The day after the tower shoot, I noticed from my apartment that the access hatch was open. I know I closed it when I left, so I called the employee that had the flashlight and helped me get up there. He had given me his cell number in case I had a problem when I was on the tower.

He wasn't at work, so I asked him to contact someone at Sears to get it closed. The next day (Saturday), I could see that the hatch was still open, so I walked over to Sears and spoke to someone who supposedly contacted a supervisor to make sure that someone shut it before the building closed for the weekend.

It's still open today (Sunday). I hope someone gets to it before it rains.

Below, you can see day and night images taken Friday of the open tower hatch. There's a light right by it that illuminates the flag at night, but it's also lighting up the hatch door.

The next picture is of a male black swallowtail butterfly that flittered around me the entire time I was on the tower roof. Maybe it lives there.

I ran a video camera from my living room while I was out. The last two pictures are stills shot off my TV as I watched the tape. The first is a celebratory arm-raising when I reached the summit and the other shows me when I was taking pictures for the above stitch (the times on the video and in the shots line up).

« Last Edit: July 22, 2012, 10:54:35 AM by BLeafe »
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Offline BLeafe

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Re: The first-ever view of Hackensack from the top of the Sears tower
« Reply #3 on: May 24, 2012, 05:32:29 PM »
This 8-picture stitch starts with a tighter shot of where the previous stitch ended.

As usual, click to enlarge.

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Offline BLeafe

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Re: The first-ever view of Hackensack from the top of the Sears tower
« Reply #4 on: May 31, 2012, 12:50:11 AM »
This 8-picture stitch completes the circle.

Click to enlarge.

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