Deckchair.com and Google Streetview - Cool Photography Projects at Paradise

Imagine my delight, we'd just set up three incredible, high resolution DSLR quality webcams and created a phenomenal aerial flyby video of the park, when the phone rang, and a local photographer, approved by Google, wanted to do a Streetview tour of the park. The planets were aligned.

Let me break it down...

I met +James Bromley at my friend +Ed Bartlett's stag do at the Latitude Festival in 2012. A fantastic weekend I will cherish forever. Lesson for that weekend learnt, was that you should always take a high quality camper van to any weekend mud-fest. It was a real luxury (thanks +Gavin Higgins).  For those of you who haven't heard the name James Bromley, you will have heard of the Mail Online. Currently the biggest online news website on Earth. Great news stories from brilliant journalists aside, this is down to James. Why? Because he was their managing director from pretty much inception. A firm believer in news for free, he made it what was it is today. Cap: doffed.

I found out James had resigned from the Mail when we needed contact with them for a national promotion we wanted to run across the zoo community. James told me he was standing down, and I clearly remember telling Steve that whatever James did next, we needed to pay attention as it would be awesome. I wasn't wrong. Fast-forward 8 months or so, and James and his new business partner Gareth have created www.deckchair.com. DSLR quality webcams across the world (The ones at the top of the Shard will be utterly spectacular). James rang me up and asked if we'd like to be among the lucky first to have some cameras on their platform. So we are just in the process of setting up 3 cameras at Paradise, in the wolves, the meerkats and the tigers. You can see them at the links below:

Tigers
Meerkats

At the same time that James and Gareth came up, they also very kindly used their drone quadracopter to do an aerial video of Paradise. It's absolutely spectacular and you can watch it below. See if you can spot Rocky! And who's that guy at the end wearing the goggles? By the way, you can see what the drone can see through the GoPro camera onboard through those goggles. It takes about 30 seconds to get going...

Finally, we were approached by local photographer +Rob Mills regarding the opportunity to add the internals of Paradise Wildlife Park to Google Streetview. They've recently rolled out an accreditation scheme whereby photographers can sell a virtual tour service that is added directly into Google maps. The way it works is like this. Every 5 metres or so, the photographer takes a full 360 degree set of photos with a super wide angle lens. The photos are then stitched together by Google's clever software later on. We were allowed 40 nodes around the park, and due to Google's tight guidelines, they got used up very quickly! So I opted for a route that took in a lot of the things we want to make more people aware of (such as the paddling pool, soft play centre etc.) and then only showed a taster of the animal park. I didn't want to give too much away!

But have a look at the video below and then follow the link to look around the park!

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