Lake Itasca, Minnesota, Source of the Mississippi River


PTViewer

Lake Itasca in northwestern Minnesota is the source of the Mississippi River. Where the Mississippi starts as the exit stream from Lake Itasca, you can walk across a series of rocks thoughtfully placed there for the purpose. Downstream a hundred feet or so is a log bridge in case you'd prefer to cross the Mississippi at less risk of wet feet (or worse...the rocks tend to be slick).

This pan was shot using a chain pod at 1/30 second, f/4 at ISO 100 using a D200 and 10.5mm fisheye. While not quite as sharp as if it were shot on a tripod with a longer exposure and smaller aperture, it gives a reasonable sense of the origin of one of the great rivers of the world.

To navigate within the panorama, press and hold the left mouse button. Moving the mouse up/down/right/left will shift the viewing window accordingly. Holding down the "Shift" key will zoom in; holding down the "Ctrl" key will zoom out.

If you have the patience and bandwidth to download a 2.7-meg file, the Quicktime QTVR file will yield much higher resolution than the smaller PTViewer file above.

The panorama was taken June 6, 2009. It was stitched using PTGui and the high-resolution Quicktime cubic VR generated using the Pano2QTVR utility.