It was a drizzly day in the Monterey area ... I went to Point Lobos to shoot a panorama ... It was hard to imagine a more spectacular place than this Big Sur section of California coastline to observe this special day ... the sun was dodging behind puffy clouds ... then the first sunset of the year 2000 just happened to be gorgeous -- I felt lucky to be alive -- such an invigorating breeze was blowing off the vast Pacific. Somehow being here on the land's edge allows me to feel the spirit of nature with greater volume and breadth. The quality of light at this moment was so rich, vibrant and rare that I was shouting at the joy of seeing and capturing it. At the same time, I was also aware of hundreds of other panographers recording their visions of the new year 2000 around the planet. Then suddenly the light went away... I had to wait a few minutes for the sun to come back out to finish shooting the last 4 shots of my circle. There are so many circles here -- earth's circular shape and orbit, circles in the number 2000, I've circled back to my first panorama at the ocean by Half Moon Bay, circles of millennial time, circles shot spinning in place.

Now that humanity completely dominates and influences the natural environment, my vision is to use QuickTime as an artform in the 2000's to help preserve what precious little wilderness is still left. I hope to experiment with VR as an expressive medium.

Tech details: I shot this using a Nikon N90s and 20mm lens, on an L-bracket atop a monopod. Scanned the raw negs on my Polaroid SprintScan 35+, built the panorama in QTVRAS v1.02, then final touches in the QuickTime Player Pro. Sound recorded on a Sharp minidisk with a Sony microphone, transferred to Mac using a direct connect cable and edited using SoundEdit16 v2, then converted to QuickTime in QuickTime Player Pro. Despite hundreds of attempts, this 8 second mono snippet of waves on the rocky shore is all that would fit in my allotment of space... compressed using the IMA4:1 22khz codec. This is only the second pano in which I recorded sound out of approximately 1200 panoramas I've shot as of Jan 2000.

Erik Goetze
www.virtualparks.org
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