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).