This phase of the project involved determining how many panoramic movies would be needed to fully document all six galleries of the Oriental Institute Museum, and exactly where in each gallery the camera would be located to shoot the panoramic scenes. Discussions among the Institute Director, Curator, Assistant Curator, Museum photographer, Research Archivist, and Head of the Computer Laboratory went on over a couple of weeks, with many trips through the galleries with camera and tripod in hand, in order to arrive at our final choice of 51 separate locations throughout the Museum and in several other Institute locations which we wanted to include as part of the project. With few exceptions, each alcove of all six galleries was recorded with a single panoramic scene. Some alcoves required two locations because either centrally located cases made viewing the entire alcove from one location impossible, or because the small size of artifacts exhibited in the alcove made a single location impractical. Once all the locations were chosen, and marked on the floor for future reference, we moved on to the task of assembling all of the necessary photographic equipment.
Several choices are possible, each with positives and negatives.
In our opinion, digital cameras at the less expensive end of the price scale did not have the quality of glass in their lenses nor an adequate choice of focal lengths for their lenses as did our Canon 35mm camera. Choice of the camera tripod equipment was next, and as with the camera choice above, the Institute already owned a basic, heavy-duty tripod. The need for very accurate leveling of the tripod and the need to turn the tripod a specific number of degrees as each still photograph is shot as part of the panoramic scene, however, requires a special mounting bracket between the camera and the basic tripod base. We chose to purchase separate components and build the mounting bracket ourselves, so that some of the components could be used by the Institute photographer for other purposes after the Virtual Museum project was completed. The last major decision was the choice of the focal length for the camera lens, which determines the number of photographs, and, therefore, the number of degrees the camera is turned between each photograph, to compose each panoramic scene.