2022
Hi all!
As @vvbellur already wrote a recap on the 360 meetup which I hosted last week with respect to WW 360 Photo Walk Meetup by @ValeriaA_. Let me share you how the meetup was to me.
My kind thanks to Vandana(@vvbellur) for encouraging me to host at Bengaluru. As every meetup, this meetup too is a special one for me for below two reasons.
-After attending 360 walk meetup at Yercaud just one day before this meetup, I came back to Bengaluru that night by travelling 200kms in bus just to join this meetup and I loved it.
-Vandana made this meetup much more interesting and effective by encouraging me to explore busy streets by taking 360photos and asking shop owners to allow us to take 360s of their shops. If not her, I would have taken photos of places having less crowd and would not be that much helpful as it became now. So I thank her.
First, we joined at Governament Aquarium near to Cubbon Park entrance. It was only me and her in the Meetup as the other attendees were unable to join it. We started taking 360photos from Government Aquarium entrance and Vandana guided me as she is a Street View Trusted Photographer. As Vandana suggested, we planned to map MG Road which is one of the most popular places in Bengaluru.
There are so many stores and outlets in MGRoad and it's usually a busy place. It was not that much crowded during meetup. But people were wondering seeing us holding something and taking it high every distance.
Some asked and we replied to them about what it is and 360s work. Pedestrians, Shop employees and even Auto rickshaw drivers too asked about it and I replied and even I took a selfie with them after explaining about 360 to them. The most interesting part of this meetup is when we were taking to store managers requesting them to allow us take 360s. Most of them welcomed us to take 360s of their stores as much as we want. The experience was super awesome during meetup by going to a store asking the store owners to allow us to take 360s, capturing it, coming out and taking 360s at streets, walking a distance, then going to another store and parallely clearing the doubts of people about what it is.
In this meetup, the last stop was a famous Textile shop. We went to the Textile and asked the Receptionist to allow us to take 360 photos of their shop. Here is the interesting one, they took five star ratings from us to allow us to take 360s. We then went inside the Textile shop and met the Textile Shop Owner and we explained him about how this 360photos of their shop will help people via Google Maps. We then discovered that the Owner itself a Level 6 Local Guide and we were happy knowing it since it's easy to explain people who are aware about the program. After an interesting discussion, the owner told us to take as much as 360s we want and we even took a photo with the owner.
It was really a full of learning and exploring experience for me. My kind thanks to Vandana for her encouragement and joining me on this meetup. Thanks to Valeria for this great initiative and all the Local Guides and Local Guides Team for all of their efforts each and everyday.
