Jorge Ortiz monitors a GigaPan & camera – Photo by Jonathan Strawn
Today was our first field exercise, at Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument. We rendezvoused at Santo Domingo Pueblo at 6:45am, and car-pooled to the monument. At the time we arrived, the sun was just beginning to light the rock formations from the east. We spent the morning hiking around the monument, photographing until our memory cards were full and our batteries were nearly dead. We had a few problems with missing or left-behind equipment and communications between our student intern teams, but we shot many spherical photographs from a variety of vantage points. It was an excellent dry-run for our week-long exercise at Chaco Culture National Historic Park next week. Our only real failure was my own, and that was my misinformation about our ability to grill our lunch at either the monument or nearby Cochiti Reservoir. Neither was feasible, so lunch was a bust.

We were short one student, Caitlin Cano, who was unable to join us. ARTS Lab Associate Director for Immersive Media was able to join her to conduct a spherical photography exercise in the Albuquerque area, where she gathered some excellent photography and gained a different type of spherical photography experience.
Special thanks to the staff of Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument for working with us to provide a fee wavier for our group’s activities.

This program is funded through Department of Defense Grant #1234567, Advanced Immersive Media for Virtual Reality Training.