I spent yesterday on/near Mt. Rainier, hiking above Mowich Lake. I put up some photos from the day here. You can also see a panorama I took using the Gigapan hardware in Spray Park here.

It was fun to play with the Gigapan device, but it has a few fundamental problems. It’s too big to carry around all the time or just leave attached to your tripod, and too expensive for casual users (the beta version was ~$250). But, it doesn’t accomodate larger, prosumer cameras like mine (at least not without some hacking), so it’s hard to take the really detailed panoramas like the ones they show on their site. I think they either need to drastically reduce the size or the price before it can be a commercial success, or go after the higher-end market and redesign it to work with larger cameras/lenses.

The good news you can infer from yesterday’s hike is that both my ankle and shoulder are on the mend. I wore an ankle brace all day, and it didn’t bother me ’til the last half mile, and even that wasn’t bad at all. And in spite of the fact that I was carrying 10 or 15 pounds worth of camera gear, my shoulder held up just fine.

I did buy some tickets to visit the Bay Area – I’ll be there October 31st thru November 2nd. Halloween in San Francisco, anyone?