Gearing up for Sziget 2009

Like the past couple of years, Andras Frenyo has invited me to join him covering the Sziget festival in fullscreen panoramas. Tomorrow is zero-day, but the festival does not really start until wednesday. I'll be leaving for Budapest tomorrow morning.

Balkan Fanatik, shot last year.

Last week I finally got round to finishing up the highres zoomable image I shot at the festival last year. I had planned to use the same robot I used for the Euromast gigapixel panorama, but the tower was moving too much so I decided to do the thing handheld. The resulting panorama is not as spectacular as the Euromast panorama, but neat nevertheless. At 500 megapixels, it consists of just under 200 individual shots.

Since last year the "panoduino" robot has gotten more stable, and it should allow me to shoot a couple of nice panoramas. I have some interesting surprises in store. If I get to finish them in time, and provided they don't break ;-)

I will once again be bringing my kite and KAP equipment. We'll see if I have more luck than last year (see above, where I did not really get my kite up very high), or at least as much luck as 2007, when my camera crashed but did not break anyone's skull.

Finally there may be a small surprise announcement regarding a panorama viewer, that I've been secretly deploying on the Sziget 360 site.

So keep an eye out for the Sziget 360 site. And while you're at it, take a look at the archives from the previous years with panoramas by Andras and myself, but also awesome contributions by Gilles Vidal from France, as well as Kristina Imre and her husband Sandor Boros from Budapest.