Umoja Festival

This panorama depicts a circle of participants at the end of a dance workshop at the Umoja Festival.

The festival was jointly organised by the Afro-Caribbean Association of Foyle and Children in Crossfire and hosted by the One World Centre, Foyle Street, Derry.

The dance workshop was lead by Ellen Factor.

One of the themes of the Umoja Festival was "a celebration of cultural diversity".

While Ireland as a whole has traditionally been thought of as a place from which people have emigrated, in recent decades there has been a marked increase in the extent of cultural diversity in Ireland - both North and South.

The One World Centre was founded by a group called SEEDS (Solidarity-Equality-Education-Diversity-Support) in order to "respond to the needs of the growing number of new citizens and migrants to the North West of Ireland region".

The SEEDS group has a committee of 18 people and has 490 members drawn from 38 nationalities living and working in the Derry area. They estimate that there are approximately 4,000 "non nationals" living, studying and working in Derry at the moment. Derry – the largest population centre in the North West of Ireland – had a population of around 100,000 at the last census.

So here we have a diverse group of people dancing, at a festival celebrating cultural diversity, in a centre whose aim is to educate about diversity ...

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Europe / UK-Northern Ireland

Lat: 54° 59' 49.09" N
Long: 8° 20' 9.52" W

Elevation: 12m

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Precision is: High. Pinpoints the exact spot.

Shot with a Canon EOS 5D, Zenitar 16mm Fisheye f/2.8 lens, with fill-in flash bounced off the ceiling. The camera was mounted on a Kaiden Kiwi panorama adapter on a Manfrotto 190XDB tripod.

Eight images were shot at 45 degree intervals, plus a ceiling and floor shot. They were stitched using HugIn (version 0.8). It was rendered as a rotating Cubic-VR using CubicConvertor and CubicConector.