David Bergman’s gigapan photo of the inauguration

February 3, 2009

Can’t embed the photo here.  Panoramic photos are cool things to use to capture history.  Photographer David Bergman made a colossal, 1,464 megapixel photo of the inauguration of Barack Obama — you gotta see it.

Bergman described it:

I made a panoramic image showing the nearly two million people who watched President Obama’s inaugural address. To do so, I clamped a Gigapan Imager to the railing on the north media platform about six feet from my photo position. The Gigapan is a robotic camera mount that allows me to take multiple images and stitch them together, creating a massive image file.

My final photo is made up of 220 Canon G10 images and the file is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to put together all of the images on my Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes.

Bergman is offering prints for sale.

Were you at the inauguration, on the Capitol grounds?  Check Bergman’s photo, and zoom in to see whether you can see yourself in history.

A smaller version of Bergmans GigaPan photo of the inauguration of Barack Obama

A smaller version of Bergman’s GigaPan photo of the inauguration of Barack Obama; go see the zoomable version at Bergman’s site, and marvel at the detail of faces

Tip of the old scrub brush to julie@century.

3 Comments | Barack Obama, History, History images, Images, President Obama, Presidents, Technology | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Quote mining Harry Truman, on confusing people

February 3, 2009

I think it was Mark Twain who said a lie can get around the world twice before the truth has got its boots on (feel free to correct me on that if you have a good source).

Whoever said it, it was right.

Now, we see that a mined quote can do the same thing as a whole lie.

Harry Truman is the victim this time.

Google turns up more than 27,000 sites with this quote, attributed to Harry Truman:

If you can’t convince them, confuse them.

Now I ask you, Dear Reader, does that sound like old Give-’em-hell Harry, the original straight talker?  Did Harry Truman really urge the use of confusion, when persuasion fails?

If you’re careful and persistent, you can turn up four Google hits for the accurate version, from his dramatic and historic campaign for election in 1948:

I don’t think you are going to be the victims this time of the old Republican doctrine:  “If you can’t convince them, confuse them.”

There you have it.  Harry Truman was not urging the use of confusion.  He was campaigning against it.

Last page of a comic book biography of Harry Truman for the 1948 campaign - Truman Library

Last page of a comic book biography of Harry Truman for the 1948 campaign - Truman Library

1 Comment | Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Campaigns, Famous quotes, Good Quotes, Harry Truman, History, History Revisionism, Political cartoons, Politics, Presidents | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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