Giant Burning Man Panoramas

Everybody who goes to Burning Man with a camera wants to somehow capture all of it. That's not possible, but taking giant panoramic photos is as close as I have come. This page was orignally made for my first shot, seen on the right. Now it's an index to five years of 360-degree views of Burning Man. If you've come, you've seen them on a large curved wall on the Esplanade. On the web, they are shown at a tiny fraction of their full resolution.

Be sure to visit my My Panorama Page for panoramas from around the world (not just Burning Man.) Or go directly to:

The later shots are the largest and most spectacular, as I've gotten better with time. 2002 features the first good night-panorama.

For each year I also have regular photo essays with normal still photos. See below

This is a panoramic photo, showing a view of 360 degrees (sort of), taken from a 4 level scaffold camp (Arcosanti Camp) in the inner circle of center camp, manward and south from Cafe Temps Perdue.

This photo was built from photos on 35mm film taken by Kathryn Myronuk, then scanned as 3000 x 2000 images on Photo-CD by Kodak. They were taken with a 90mm lens, and the result is a huge panorama.

To the right is a "thumbnail" of sorts of the picture that is 1764 by 80 pixels, to give you a taste of what you will see. Of course the real images are not turned on their side.

I prepared the main image large for printing (more on that below) but for screen view I have two, still very large versions available.

Please note the largest versions will not show in version 4 or earlier of Netscape Navigator. No image more than 8000 wide will. Upgrade to Mozilla today, or save the files and view them in a JPEG viewer.

You can scale the image to any size on the main pano page, or here you can view the 17091 x 768 or 23812 x 1070 or 7999 x 359 versions.

Black Rock Cafe T-shirt!

There are a couple of ways to view these. For almost any of them you will need a machine with lots of memory. Most of the quality shareware JPEG viewers and image browsers can handle these images and pan through them. Try ACDSee or IrfanView on Windows, or xv -nolimits on unix.

Bugs and Technical Notes

You can read notes on bugs in the picture and how I made it, plus notes on printing it.

Guide

The image begins just to the right of the Man, and sweeps over various art installations to the southern (sleeping) section of Black Rock City and in to center camp.

There you see the stage and the Cafe Temps Perdue, in the very center of the populated part of the city. You can see the Radio Free Burning Man trailer, Then we sweep north, to the non-sleeping arm of the City.

From there you see the Nebulous Entity, a giant moving tree-like object that looks like thousands of waving tentacles. At the far right is the "tree of life" a metal tree that both burned and rained water at the same time. You can see lots of people congregating around it naked to get in some of the water. There we switch to the short low-resolution segment for the promenade, and on the far right is The Man, in the distance. He's down on his back, as they wire him up with explosives for the burn later that night. This was taken mid-day Sunday.

Also consider digging out your Map of Black Rock City 98. The panorama was taken from the Arcosanti camp in the center camp circle.

Other Burning Man Photo Archives

Official Burning Man photo page index.

Ring of Fire Burning Man Webring: [NEXT] [SKIP] [RANDOM] [LIST] JOIN the Ring!

More of My Photos

Here you can read my account of Burning man and peruse, with thumbnails, my galleries of the 5 years I've been to Burning Man.

Some of the pictures are large, but when you click on one you will be given the option to set a default size for your picture viewing if you are on a slow link or small screen. The most interesting photos are marked with a cyan border

Warning (or teaser) -- there is nudity in these photos. But frankly, if you're going to be like half the visitors and click only on the photos that might have a naked breast in them, there are really much better sites in the BM photo archives for that.

Burning Man 1998 Essay and 70 photos (with thumbnails) in 6 parts.
Burning Man 1999 Essay and 68 high-quality photos (with thumbnails) in 5 parts.
Burning Man 2000 Essay and 110 high-quality photos (with thumbnails) in 9 parts.
Burning Man 2001 Essay and 120 high-quality photos (with thumbnails) in 9 parts.
Burning Man 2002 Essay and 150 Canon D60 quality photos (with thumbnails) in 6 parts.
Burning Man 2003 Essay and 150 Canon D60 quality photos (with thumbnails) in 8 parts.
Burning Man 2004 Essay and 150 Canon D60 quality photos (with thumbnails) in 7 parts.

Here are some other useful pages.