Recently in Panoramas Category

With Paraglider over Campo croce near Bassano del Grappa soaring the thermals on the southern slopes of Mte Grappa Canon 50D with Sigma 4,5 mm Fisheye, free-hand, PTGUI, Photoshop CS3, Pano2VR"

[Source: 'Flugpano Papierfassung' on 360cities.net.]

I just have one question: How on earth did Martin shoot this!?

Those who follow my blog know how I love 360º panoramas. They are such fun (and challenging) to shoot and build. Jeffery Martin, one of the founders at 360Cities is Mr. Pano. I can't imagine how difficult this pano was to create and am confident that his brief set of answers below belies the difficulty and challenge of his accomplishment! (I certainly couldn't have done such a thing, even with a robotic arm.)

You've got to check it out. The level of detail in this image goes way beyond astounding. Click the photo above and zoom in and around. Check out the people sitting in the distant park. Apparently Jeffery will have a treasure hunt related to the pano, with a $1,000 prize, and started releasing a clue a day for 30 days.

How did you create this panorama? I used a Canon 5d mark 2 and a 70-200mm lens, set to 200mm. The camera was mounted on a robotic device which turned the camera in tiny, precise increments, in every direction. All together, 40 gigabytes of images were shot. These images were then stitched together using PTGui. The resulting panorama was adjusted for color, contrast, sharpness, etc. in Photoshop. Afterwards, the image was cut into lots of ‘tiles’ and uploaded to our server. When you view the image online, you only load a few of these ‘tiles’ at one time.

How long did you spend stitching this panorama? Between loading the initial raw files into the computer, and having the panorama stitched, it took about a week. It took 3 additional weeks to fine-tune the image.

What kind of computer did you use? I used a four year-old windows PC with two single-core 3ghz xeon processors and 8GB of RAM. After a week of frustration, I also bought an SSD, which helped to speed up some tasks a bit. If I will make this image again, I will buy a new computer.

What is dimension of this panorama, and size it takes on disk? The final image exists as a 120 gigabyte photoshop large (PSB) file. It cannot exist as a TIFF or JPEG file because of their size constraints. The panorama online exists as a few hundred thousand small tiles (in JPEG format), and they take up about 1 gigabyte of disk space.

Link to the panorama

(Via Prague 18 Gigapixels – How was it made? «360 Cities Official Blog.)

I don't know what I did to cause this pano to be so blurry when viewed full screen on a large monitor, but it is what it is.

Every photo is it's own challenge, and this one had many! Just as I was almost set up in front of the ocean for the pano shots, the weather degenerated quickly into an all out down pour with no end in sight. I started packing it up while getting drenched. Half way back to the car, it stopped. I hesitated. Back I trod.

Now, while shooting, people and a dog come into the scene. O well, as I said, it is what it is. Then the ocean surf became particularly aggressive, coming up to the camera/tripod.

I just started shooting the pano as quickly as possible. (I don't think I even thought about focus at all!) Next I noticed one of the tripod legs had sunk into the sand and the careful balance needed for the perfect pano was to be hopeless.

I doubted the stitching software would even be able to generate the pano file. Amazingly, it did it and extremely fast!!

But the scene was too gorgeous not to share. So even though the pano lacks sharp focus, enjoy it!

I'm so glad I had the opportunity to visit Norway in the summer of 2006--just over 3 years ago now. That country has such a pastoral serenity during the summer months. I reflected on my visit because I stumbled upon these two marvelous panos from one of my favorite sites, 360 Cities.

Here are a few of my pictures presented below. You can also visit my Norway gallery if you wish for more of this breath-taking 2006 trip. This post ends with the two panos from Norway that prompted this journey down memory lane. When viewed in fullscreen on a huge monitor, these panos are stupendous!

Click any image below for a larger view.

Solestrand

Loen

Balestrand, Norway

Balestrand, Norway

Balestrand, Norway

Hardangervidda, Norway

Borgund Stave Church, Borgund, Laerdal, Norway in Norway

Ferry Cruise Hellesylt - Geiranger, Geiranger Fjord, Norway in Norway

Even though this pano has some serious stitching issues, it's just too beautiful not to share!

Bar le Tapecul in France

Rock Church - Helsinki, Finland in Helsinki

And now I absolutely must try it! Very clever. Very creative. A few stitching artifacts, though... For the best viewing experience, go to full screen.

Drum roll please!

Well, with lots of tweaks and a few fixes here and there still to be done, the project is far enough along to warrant the big announcement.

After hundreds and hundreds of hours of work, the entirely reworked photo gallery at timtyson.us is ready to go live and is officially being called: Photography by Tim Tyson.

The new photo section has been significantly updated. Well, actually, it has been completely redone from the ground up. So what's the big deal? Below are just some of the changes.

• now features over 10,000 of my images in nearly 200 albums contained in 20 galleries.
• completely new navigation system that introduces videos, including an awesomely slick video tutorial on using the navigation system.
• includes pan and zoom (Ken Burns) in numerous albums
• images cross dissolve from one to the other
• new online photo management system (slideshowpro--totally rocks my world) now effectively links into my desktop photo management software, Lightroom 2, making uploading new content vastly, vastly. vastly easier
• huge images are now stored on the server
• full screen mode is now available
• when you select full screen mode, the software on my server actually checks the size of your monitor and then produces images for you to see (from the full size images on the server) that are the exact size of your monitor
• as a result of the above process, you get tailor-made images without any upscaling, and they are simply gorgeous
• many other features too numerous and complicated to go into

One word of caution. Since the server waits until someone looks at an album to create the images for that album in real time, if you click on an album no one has seen yet, you may experience a slow response getting the images (especially if you go into full screen mode and have a huge monitor) as the server will be very busy creating, for the first time, all of the pictures for that album. This is the one down side of setting up my photo management system this way. However, once the images are built by the server for your monitor size, everyone else who visits with the same size monitor will not have the delay. (You get the same benefit when visiting an album someone else has already visited.) In time, once all of the thumbnails and images have been sized for all the different monitor sizes, this issue will no longer exist.

Dial up just simply isn't an option here. Your connection speed really matters now. If you have a large monitor and go into full screen mode, forget using dial up. You will wait forever to get a single image. General network traffic can also have an impact on how quickly the images appear on your screen.

To visit the new photo collection, click the picture of it below or click on the Photos link in the top navigation system.

And the photographer had to carry all of that equipment up more than 10 flights of stairs?! Makes me dizzy.

For all the news, it really is a big gorgeous world out there. Check out this Pano and the others linked to it...

Sunrise at Robert's Grove in Belize

I mentioned a day or two ago that I spent almost two weeks in the Canadian Rockies--about a month ago now. I spent some time today working on an album which will still require a few more days to complete.

This picture below is a collection of about 16 photographs (2 rows of 8) that I aligned using Photoshop. It's not really a panorama in the sense of the usual panos that I publish. However, I did create a few of those as well.

Right now, I'm sharing the image below. If you click on it, a larger version will open that will not fully fit on your screen unless your monitor is one of the very large Apple Cinema Displays (2560 pixels wide and 609 pixels high). You will need to scroll from left to right to see the full image. The original file (of the 16 combined photographs) is over 4 gigabytes and 22,000 pixels wide!

The grandeur of these snow and ice covered mountains simply can not be captured with a camera--even in 16 shots stitched together.

Click the picture above to see the larger image.

The sun was way too hot for this pano to work well, but I still wanted to try it out. I just love the front doors on this house! They are astoundingly heavy--solid iron works with windows that unlock and open.

Well, I think I've finally figured out how to get a pretty good panorama stitch in one try. Here are the details:

I'm using my new Canon 5D Mark II with the Sigma 8mm 3.5 fisheye lens. Since the 5D has a full sensor, I'm getting a significant amount of overlapping information in the 6 shots, each 60º from the previous shot. This alone made an enormous difference in stitching ease!

I also purchased a new pano head, the Adjuste, from 360Precision. The older pano head, the Absolute, would not work with my new 5D. Rather than purchasing a new arm for the Absolute, I just bought the new head that will work with any camera/lens combination. I like this pano head far better. It's adjustable and half as heavy as the Absolute--which is really heavy.

The Adjuste posed a new problem I hadn't had before: this pano head has an adjustable arm across the bottom so it can accommodate any camera/lens combination. The base arm is rather obvious in the base shots. Removing it in Photoshop is a total pain!!

To remedy this issue, I am now shooting 12 shots: 2 rows of 6 at 60º distance each. The bottom row is angled down 30º. The top row is angled up 30º. Now I don't need to shoot any base shots at all, and the duplicated information is used by the stitching program so the pano base arm is calculated out of the bottom of the stitched image--wonderful!

So get ready. I've made some quick panos today and am about to post them...

One year ago yesterday, the movers were unloading the truck here at the house in California, and the adventure was in full swing. I only had one week to unpack everything before I had to start traveling again. I don't know what I was thinking--get it all done in a week?! The unpacking almost killed me. Having no idea where the printer was at the time, I couldn't even print my boarding pass for my next trip. With all of my traveling, my home office wasn't unpacked for another 4 months.

Yesterday I did my taxes on the one year anniversary of the California unpacking adventure. The full week of unpacking was less tortuous than doing the California taxes, let me assure you!

But, to celebrate living in paradise, I thought I would post a pano of the house now. It looks a lot different than it did a year ago! Click on the image to view the pano. Click here to view the pano with the Pangea plugin. (Mac only and absolutely worth the install from this link if you don't already have it. Oh, and it's free.)

Click on each image below to see the 360º panorama linked to that image and shot on location in Maine.

The first pano was one of my more difficult challenges as I shot the pano from a floating dock, meaning I was bobbing up and down. Precision is everything in the pano shoot. The last thing you want is for the camera to move--at all! And then there was this little issue of trying to stay out of the picture without falling off of the narrow dock and into the water. Miraculously, I stayed dry.

I had issues with the Cadillac Mountain pano as well. The wind was blowing so fiercely, and was it ever cold! I had to hold on to the tripod to keep it from blowing over. I then realized that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't keep the tripod from shaking in the wind! Again, that whole precision issue!

Remember, once the pano window opens, you can click and drag anywhere you want to see in the 360º field of view. Enjoy!

Click Above: Alamoosook Lake and Lakeside Inn

Click Above: The very point of Schoodic Point in Acadia National Park

Click Above: Atop Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park

Click the image to see the impressive panorama of China's Great Wall at sunset.

I had heard of this beach from a man living in Santa Monica. "Don't miss it!" he said. "But it's impossible to find. The locals want to keep it a secret. It's gorgeous and unlike any other." I had seen it on the maps of the California coast when I was downloading topography maps into my GPS. (I wanted to be sure to stay on the coastal area itself, mostly Highway 1.) So I told the unit to guide me to this beach, not really knowing what to expect. Interestingly, the GPS unit that came with the rental car did not have Pfeiffer Beach listed in Points of Interest!

The large, rather fancy stone sign for the beach is on the unassuming ancillary road to the beach itself--a full half mile away from the main road, completely impossible to see from the main road. You would never accidentally stumble upon this place even if you were looking for it. The road to the beach itself is long and just appears to be connecting private driveways to houses nestled in the canyon.

The day after visiting Pfeiffer Beach I learned from a lady, a native of the area who was breathing in the explosive costal energy of Point Lobos, that I was at Pfeiffer Beach on one of the two times per year that the sun actually peeks through the hole (which you cannot see in the pano below but can in the picture above) in the enormous craggy rock on the north beach. This magic hour appearance only happens at sunset and casts long fiery light in the ocean-soaked sands as the waves retreat during low tide. Every year photographers flock to this mecca as if participating in a holy observance, a spiritual awakening to be glimpsed only for a short time--long enough to last one all year.

I saw a giant picture (probably 6 feet by 4 feet) of this phenomenon in the hotel in which I stayed at Carmel. Astounding! If I had only stayed 2.5 hours longer, I wouldn't have missed it! But no worries, I've marked the calendar for next year's pilgrimage.

This place, the Pacific coast from Big Sur to Point Lobos, feeds my soul, or, as my guide the day before put it, "This is my happy place." But for me it's much more significant than just "happy." It's peace, equilibrium, Bach--a deep nurturing energy of soul.

The wind chill was all but unbearable. The extremely heavy tripod I use blew over! At times pictures of the sandy beach looked out of focus because the sand was being blown in high speed currents. This place is amazing!

Click on the picture above to see the panorama.

And, of course, you can view a nicer version using the Pangea Plugin (you must have the free plugin installed on your Mac) version at this link.

More, much more to come in the days to follow. I shot nearly 2,500 pictures of the Pacific Coast: Los Angeles, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Santa Monica, Cambria, Big Sur, Point Lobos, and San Fransisco to name a few. I shot over a dozen panoramas--a big first. Below is a mapped overview of the vacation travel starting in southern California, Los Angeles, and working my way north, San Francisco. The dots represent locations where large groups of pictures were shot.

I synced my GPS and camera and then merged the tracking data into the EXIF picture file data: Tah-dah: Instant locational photo journal!! Each picture actually knows where it was taken on Planet Earth and will be just a click away on Google Earth! I know, only a geek gets excited about such things! And I just love it!

Clicking on the NASA map above opens a larger version.

While shooting this pano, below, of the sunrise on the Manhattan Beach Peer, an older gentleman with a kind smile walked up to the homeless man on the peer, all bundled up, sitting in his wheelchair, and offered him $2.00. The homeless man turned him down scoffing, "What can you buy with just $2.00?" Well, maybe a cup of hot coffee from the shop just a block away would have been a nice addition to this cold blustery morning!

Click the image above to view the panorama.

And, of course, you can view a nicer version using the Pangea Plugin (you must have the free plugin installed on your Mac) version at this link.

Since no one believes me, obviously I need to prove once and for all that indeed I do know how to get around in the kitchen and the dining room. So here is a pano as irrefutable proof! And, naturally, no pano post would be complete without access to a Pangea Plugin version which can be found at this link.

Click the photo above to see me at home in the kitchen and dining room

Ok. I couldn't stand the pano I posted yesterday of my office. It was too blurry and too grainy. These things bother Tim. So I reshot it this morning at a higher ISO (400). Oh, and I made sure I actually focused the camera--details. (Shooting panos is mostly done in manual mode. If you forget to focus the lens...) The end result is a vast improvement from yesterday's post. So, if you looked at the pano on the day it was originally posted, yesterday, and have a need to see a better result, simply revisit yesterday's post. The links now take you to new files.

Yes, born in this place are all of the great ideas to solve all of the world's problems. The room also serves as a guest room and media room. The bright light from the windows made the pano a bit blurry and grainy even at 100 ISO. Hum. And, naturally, no pano post would be complete without access to a Pangea Plugin version which can be found at this link.

Click the photo above to visit my office

The old Dekalb County Water Works has long since been abandoned. The forest and the graffiti artists are laying claim to the area.

Only some very large concrete retention tanks remain along with some foundations and one area of mostly collapsed, vine-covered brick walls. Here and there steps lead up to no place. An old stone bridge arches over the nearby creek. It too goes nowhere–just a bridge in the middle of the forest, rather odd indeed.

Not far from these ruins is a damn that was intentionally smashed in its middle to allow the creek, which at one time served as the county water supply, to now flow through. Large stone benches still line the side of the creek. What did the place look like back "in the day?" Were there roads to this place deep in the middle of the forest?

To see a pano of what it looks like now, simply click the image below. The Pangea Plugin version can be viewed from this link.

Yet another really good reason for all my Windows-using friends to ditch that horrible operating system: The Pangea Plugin will not work on Windows, even on the Windows version of Safari.

The good news: I have also now redone the Lake Allatoona pano that was featured in this post on October 21st. The Pangea version can be viewed at this link. The QuickTime version can be viewed at this link.

The Lenox Park Maze that was featured in this post on October 13th may now be viewed at this link.

I decided to go ahead and purchase PTGui. After upgrading to Leopard (OS 10.5), Stitcher from RealViz, which I also really like, ceased to render a final pano. I talked with their tech support and a patch is in the works, but the timeline has not yet been announced. I was advised to visit their site regularly for the announcement. I might end up with both products. Each seems to have particular strengths in different circumstances.

Here is a pano I shot last April of The Wells Fargo Center in downtown Los Angeles. If you want to see the pano in your browser using the Pangea Plugin Viewer* (vastly superior), click here. Otherwise, click the picture below to view the pano.

I must say, I am extremely impressed with PTGui. You will notice a flabbergastingly enormous number of intersecting horizontal and vertical lines in this pano. In PTMac I could never get these lines to connect correctly across the shots that comprise the pano, so the pano was never published. Using PTGui, every line lines up flawlessly! Mind blowing! In this case, the actual application itself does a better job than the trial you can download!

And, by the way, I used high resolution photos with minimal compression, hence the file takes a bit of time to download with high speed access. (Sorry dial up will probably not work.) So, go ahead, zoom in and read the paper over his shoulder!

Be patient as this is a large file that takes time to download. It will appear grey and blurred until it is fully downloaded.

*The Pangea Plugin is free and simple to download and install into your browser. Click here to go to the download page at Pangea. Oh, it only works on a Mac. Hmm... I wonder if it will work in Safari for Windows?! I'll shoot an email to Brian and ask.

But first, I had to figure out how to create this pano. I shot these shots in June of 2006, holding my camera, hoping I could later stitch the photos together into a pano--doubtful without the tripod. Tonight, over a year later, I tried both PTGui and RealViz's Stitcher. The fact that the camera was handheld made it unlikely that a pano would be born, but born it was. PTGui seemed to do the better job.

This is the midnight sun from the northern most tip of Norway, Knivskjellodden, located in the municipality of Nordkapp in Norway, which is generally considered the northernmost point of the entire continent of Europe. The North Pole is just over 1,200 miles from here and would be directly under the sun, which, of course, is still visible at midnight!

I admit to doctoring the image below with a little lens flare where the sun was lurking behind the clouds, but the pano itself is without edit. Since I shot this as a single row of shots with a 12mm focal length lens, you will not be able to see the extreme top or bottom of the pano. But it turned out pretty cool as it is. (The software is still in demo mode; so, you will see "buy me" watermarks. Still wondering which software is best.)

The tragedy of the failing water supply really hit home today when I visited part of Lake Allatoona, one of the two lakes that supplies Atlanta with drinking water.

One area of the lake is completely dry. In chatting with a man who is the host for a campground that has been closed for 3 years, he said this particular area "went completely dry two weeks ago." His job at the campground is to prevent vandalism, and four wheelers and trucks from getting stuck in the muddy bottom of the lake. In the picture above (click on it for a larger version), you can see where a truck tried to make it across the dry lake bed.

In this first picture on the left, "No Wake," is No Problem as there is No Water. The full picture on the right gives you some sense of how high the water should be in the lake. Yes, the zoomed in sign on the left is from near the top of the bridge support structure in the picture on the right (click to enlarge). Instead of water that would be at least 10 feet deep in normal conditions, you can see a tiny litle stream of water that isn't even an inch deep, a stream that dries up before it ever gets into the main lake. Additionally, from the pano at the bottom of this post, I would have been standing in water well over my head, probably between 10 and 15 feet deep. Of course, there is no water at all. In the distance of the lake bed (pictured below on the left) you can see the signs of new life--green plants are growing in what was once the lake's bottom. In the next picture (below on the right) you can see what once was a floating buoy warning boaters in the lake to slow down to prevent dangerous wake near the bridge. The water level here would also have been well over my head.

When I was a child growing up on the Gulf of Mexico, I always thought it would be totally cool to see the bottom of the Gulf without any water. This is surreal. It isn't cool. It speaks of the tragic. Click on the picture below to see a pano of the empty lake.

The art and science of making a pano has been a royal headache to date: trying to calibrate my 8mm fisheye so I could develop a lens template has all but driven me to drink! And all of the recommendations and step-by-steps leave major aspects of the process out or assume you understand the deep science of optical arts: precise focal length, precise nodal point, distortion measurements, control point variance minimized, pitch, yaw, roll, blah, blah, blah.

However, I've learned recently that my headache is bad software--or, at the very least, software that is anything but helpful. I downloaded the trial version of RealViz, after seeing it was used by a panographer (is there such a thing?) who produced some astoundingly difficult panos with intricate lines. The user interface and the whole logic of the process of the new software is very different. You work in 3D space! Being completely unfamiliar with the tools, I just clicked the autostitch button to see what happened.

Dear god! Instant pano without a single issue! I tried several panos that I've shot but never assembled because I can't get them to work at all. Autostitch: instant pano! The only retouching I did on the one presented below was take out the tripod from the bottom shot! That's it.

So what's the catch? About $600! But it works! It really works!! So before I plop down the cash, I'm going to double check around the www to see if any other miracles are out there. In the mean time: here's an instant unretouched pano of an area that would be a headache from hell in my other software. The wind blowing through the trees would alone have sent me wailing from my work at the computer! And the tiny lines in the far building would have been the beginnings of utter insanity.

Click above to view the panorama. It's over 10 meg and will take time to download (clear up).

(Update: The final pano posted above is now a pano made by PTGui.)

After seeing Versailles - Galerie des glaces I was inspired. How on earth did the photographer gain sole access? How did the photographer get such a dead sharp, beautifully lit image? Just a spectacular result. So, I decided to assemble a pano I shot in Alaska, regrettably, the only pano I shot in Alaska.

Click above to view the panorama. It's over 20 meg and will take time to download (clear up).