About burning man, my other home
As I prepare for Burning Man 2011, I realized I had not put my gallery of regular sized photos up on the web.
Much earlier I announced my gallery of giant panoramas of 2010 which features my largest photos in a new pan-and-zoom fullscreen viewer, I had neglected to put up the regular sized photos.
I have put up a page of panoramas from Burning Man 2010. This page includes my largest yet, a 1.2 billion pixel image of the whole of Black Rock City which you will find first on the page. I am particularly proud of it, I hope you find it as amazing as I do.
One of the toughest challenges the Burning Man staff face is placing all the camps in the city. This stopped being an anarchy long ago, and the city is mapped and each camp given a precise area. The city has various "premium" locations which are valued in part for being close to things but mainly because they are high traffic for camps showing off interesting art or interactivity. Far more camps want to be in the premium locations than there is room, and almost everybody serious wants to be pre-placed somewhere so they can plan in advance and not have to race in the land-rush when the event officially opens.
(Some people like the land-rush. While you will not get a spot very close to the Esplanade or be able to be on the maps and calendars by address, you will get a bigger space for your group, because it's "take what you dare.")
Camps submit applications (this year by the start of May) describing the contribution they will offer the city, where they would like to be, and how much space they need. A team of placers (mostly volunteers with a few paid leaders) try to allocate the camps. They try to be fair, but the process is largely opaque, so any biases and mistakes are not generally visible to the community.
The process takes time, and the placement last year was announced to the community in early August, just a few weeks before the event. Camps are told only their approximate street location, and their dimensions. For reasons few have been able to fathom, the actual precise map, showing who is on corners and who is next to whom, is kept secret until the event itself. Many factors go into the decision, including camp density, past reputations, the various prime locations available, camps that want or don't wan't to be next to other camps, loudness and quality and interactivity of the art in the camp.
In 2009, the placers decided something which was a fairly big surprise to the community. They decided not to place around 120 of the camps that applied at all. Those camps were left to the land-rush, which meant a few distressing things for them:
The placement team decided not to place these camps because they did not want to find themselves placing the majority of the city. They wanted the city to retain some randomness and made a decision that only a limited fraction of the city would be subject to mapping in advance. If too many camps applied, those who did not make the cut would not be placed. This decision caused some controversy, and there are arguments for both sides. In addition to the non-placements, there were also many camps surprised by their placement (usually negatively) and, as would be expected in any large volunteer effort, a modest number of mistakes.
I have put up a gallery of panoramas for Burning Man 2009. This year I went with the new Canon 5D Mark II, which has remarkable low-light shooting capabilities. As such, I generated a number of interesting new night panoramas in addition to the giant ones of the day.
In particular, you will want to check out the panorama of the crowd around the burn, as seen from the Esplanade, and the night scene around the Temple, and a twilight shot.
Two years ago, I discussed solutions for Burning Man Exodus. The problem: Get 45,000 people off the playa in 2 days, 95% of them taking a single highway south which goes through a small town which has a chokepoint capacity of about 450 cars/hour. Quite often wait times to get onto the road are 4 hours or more, though this year things were smoother (perhaps due to a lower attendance) and the number of people with 4 hour waits was lower.
Some upcoming events I will be involved in:
As I have for the past several years, I will show off my newest giant photographs of Burning Man at the "decompression" party, which takes place from noon to midnight on Sunday, Oct 12 (this coming Sunday) on Indiana St. south of Mariposa in San Francisco.
In my previous post, I noted that I had not done many night panoramas of Burning Man. I thought I should outline just why they are such a challenge.
Back from Burning Man and still dusty, here are five large panoramas to give you a sense of it.
It's amazing how much preparation is required for Burning Man. Or at least if you are crazy like me and plan to spend 11 days there, have 4 art projects, manage a new camp and still survive.
You non-burner blog readers are probably sick of the flood of Burning Man stuff this time of year, but I need to tell a few remarkable stories from the Playa this year about how sometimes, it all works out in amazing ways.
I have generated several of my panoramas for this year's Burning Man.
This year featured a double rainbow, and of course much of the week with no man on his pedestal.
As you know, I took photos of the burning man arson and put them up very quickly, so we did not yet know it was arson, or the reason.
Like most people, even before knowing it was arson was shock. Would this cancel the Saturday burn? Even to the jaded, the burn remains the climax of the event. It is the one time the whole city gets together and has a common experience. (This year the Crude Awakenings burn also did that.) My photos last year are Burning Man's only "group portrait" I would expect. It has, however, become very much a spectator rather than participatory event. The days of volunteers helping to raise the man are long gone.
The burn has also become overdone, under the burden of having to be the climax of an already extravagant week. Each year they feel they have to outdo prior years, and that's a slope that can't be maintained. New burners (virgins) would be impressed by any level of burn, I think, so I presume they do it for themselves and a perception of impressing the old-timers. Still, it was disturbing to think the climax of the event would be removed, and good when it was clear the fire was not so bad as to stop a restoration or rebuilding.
But then I was surprised to see how positive the reaction was. Aside from the team that had their work destroyed (and would now have to give up several days of their event to rebuild) I would even judge the overall perception of the arson to be quite positive. Addis claims it was done with care to assure nobody was under the Man. Having had my own art vandalized (not nearly this badly) at Burning Man, I know how deeply that wounds. So I can't approve of how it was done. But there was a large amount of support for what it meant. (Reportedly even from Larry Harvey.) In fact, since I didn't talk to the rebuilding crew, I can't say I met more than a handful of people who expressed any particular disapproval (or even non-approval) of it. And that surprised me, at first.
Background: Burning Man is an astounding annual gathering in the remote Black Rock Desert of Nevada where up to 50,000 people create a temporary city for a week, which then vanishes. The city is devoted to art, creativity and radical self-expression. Since 1996, each year has had an "art theme" which provides inspiration for about a third of the art created that year, as well as the central Man.
I've created a new blog category "Burning Man" to track my posts on the event. I was using a simpler tag before.
Today I want to talk about the Burning Man Exodus problem, a problem you might find interesting even if you don't come to Burning Man. This year, even at 8pm Monday there was a long line and a 2 hour wait to get off the playa. Normally by about 5pm there is no wait. With 45,000 or more this year, and I presume at least 15,000 to 20,000 vehicles, and various chokepoints limiting traffic to 450 cars/hour, how do you drain the playa when everybody wants to go Sunday and Monday. (In addition, with so many now leaving Sunday, it makes Monday less interesting driving some who could leave Monday to leave earlier.)
It has now been routine to see waits of 5 hours or more at the peak times. I believe a solution should be possible involving some sort of appointment system, where cars are given a set time to leave, and they leave then. If they want to go at a peak time, instead of waiting 5 hours in line, they spend 5 hours in the city, or doing more cleanup, instead of idling their car in a giant line. Not that the line doesn't become a little bit of a party, but it's still not like being in camp. And for my exodus on Monday night there as the worst dust storm ever for Exodus, you could not see the car in front of you, or the fence beside you.
However, a good system to hand out appointments is hard to design. First of all, we have a mostly volunteer crew, and they don't have much law enforcement power to stop violators or ticket them. (More participation by the police in this, when the city truly needs them, instead of having them be there for pot busts that nobody wants would be a great thing.)
Here are some of the constraints:
Update: I now have a whole Burning Man area on the blog!
I've not been blogging of late because I'm at Burning Man, and while normally I don't report breaking news in this blog, we just witnessed a strange event. Through accident or arson, the Man was set alight this evening shortly after totality began in the eclipse of the moon.
It's way late, but I finally put captions on my gallery of regular-aspect photos from Burning Man 2006.
This year's theme for Burning Man is "the Green Man." It represents a lot of things. For many it just is an inspiration for art centered on nature or the environment. Others are taking it as a signal to try to be better environmentally. That's going to be a very tough road for a festival centered on building a temporary city far from everything and pyrotechnic art.
While it will be a while before I get the time to build all my panoramas of this year's Burning Man, I did do some quick versions of some of those I shot of the burn itself. This year, I arranged to be on a cherry picker above the burn. I wish I had spent more time actually looking at the spectacle, but I wanted to capture panoramas of Burning Man's climactic moment. The entire city gathers, along with all the art cars for one shared experience. A large chunk of the experience is the mood and the sound which I can't capture in a photo, but I can try to capture the scope.
Hot on the heels of the regular photos the gallery of 2005 Burning Man Panoramas is now up. This year, I got to borrow a cherry picker at sunset on Friday for some interesting perspectives. The long ones are around 3400 by 52000 at full res (180 megapixels) and even the ones on the web are larger than before. Use F11 to put your browser into full screen mode.
I've gotten way behind on putting up my photographs, and I realized I had never put my Burning Man 2005 shots up. We're already planning for 2006.
So I got them up this weekend. Of particular interest to burners this year will be the aerial survey I did of the city, over 200 close-up photos of just about every camp in the city from the sky.
And yes, I shot plenty of panoramas, and I have built most of them, but still don't have the panorama page up.
