Burning Man at Night - 2007 - Esplanade from 2 to 4 o'clock by Patrick Salsbury

Panasonic Lumix DMZ-50

This is a panorama from roughly the center of the city, looking at part of the inner ring, or Esplanade, from 2 to 4 o'clock. (The city runs in a circle from 2 to 10 o'clock, so this is only 1/4 of the inner ring. It also goes outward about 13 blocks deep beyond what you see here on the Esplanade!)

It was constructed from ~16 wide-angle photos taken on Aug 29, 2007, from approx. 1:00am to 1:20am. The exposure time for the individual frames was 10.0 sec, which captures a lot of the glow and just a bit of the magic of Nighttime on the Playa.

At this exposure length & light level, most people don't even register on the camera, but the glowing, blinking, and flashing things they're carrying/riding on certainly do! Throughout the photo you'll see odd swirls, spirals, and lines/streaks/dots. These are people zooming about on bicycles decorated with "glow". Everyone and everything is required to have some glow on it at night, so that no one gets killed by crashing into a dark something (or someone!) out in the middle of nowhere. The end result is truly dazzling, and in constant motion and change.

This panorama was taken shortly after I got my new camera with a great lens, but long before I (just recently) got my shiny new GigaPan rig. Still, I'm very pleased with this photo, and it meets the minimum size requirements, so I thought I'd share it. Enjoy!

If you want to see some of my other shots of Burning Man (including lots of other pre-GigaPan panoramas that are probably too small to upload here), check out my web gallery: reality.sculptors.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=BurningMan