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From here, you can view my Spherical Panoramas, or you can go to my photostream on Flickr, where you can also leave comments. |
If these quicktime-vr images are downloading slowly, and you have a Shockwave plugin, you might try going over to my photos on Flickr, which let you use fieldofview.com to view them interactively, rather than the quicktime here. If you have a flickr account, you can also leave comments about the photos there.
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29 March 2008 Inside Lick Observatory's Great Refractor Dome Nestled atop Mt. Hamilton just east of San Jose, Lick Observatory, which has nothing to do with tongues, is home to several telescopes, including this gigantic refractor. This is one of the neatest interiors I've seen in a while. Visited last Decemeber, but hadn't been there since I was a kid, and it's still neat! There's a very windy road leading up to it, and I have childhood memories of trying to spot the wrecked cars that had driven off to their doom whenever we drove up. This photo is of the first telescope built on the site, which was constructed between 1876 and 1887. The body of James Lick lays entombed beneath. Beat that for ambiance!! The entire floor that you see raises and lowers so that the eyepiece of the telescope can be at eye level for the astronomers. You can see the counterweights along the walls. The telescope itself is balanced so that a single person can just grab hold of it and drag it around to point it at the right place. All in all, a neat place to visit. If this quicktime doesn't work for you, you can view interactively with shockwave. Also, you can visit this image on flickr, or see an alternate projection of this image here. |
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16 March 2008 Iraq Body Count Exhibit You can just make out a thin strip of red flags in the distance. A sign nearby reads: "Each white flag represents at least 5 Iraqis, Each red flag represents 5 Americans killed as a result of the 2003 invasion of Iraq." As of March, 2008, iraqbodycount.org estimates about 85,000 civilians have died from violence in Iraq since 2003. This was an installation at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, March 2008. You can learn more about it here. If this quicktime doesn't work, you can View interactively with shockwave. You can also visit this image on flickr. |
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3 March 2008 The Quiet Before the Storm What a way to go! My second go at an enfused panorama. Much more ghosting that my first attempt, but pretty easy to clean up. If you don't have quicktime, you can try to view interactively with shockwave. |
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3 March 2008 A 24-hour Comics Jam This was one of many such events hosted at illustrator and graphic novelist David Chelsea's place, in July of 2006, in the spirit of of 24 Hour Comics day, where cartoonists have 24 consecutive hours to create a finished 24 page comic. I've managed to get one done on time, not this time around, but the previous year. At this jam, I opted to chicken out and just take photos. Surprisingly enough, some of these comics even turn out pretty good! Photographed with 30 photos from this thing. If this quicktime doesn't come up, you can try to view with a shockwave viewer. |
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2 March 2008 Get Your Walnuts Here This is another of my older panoramas from 2006 made with 30 photos taken with this thing. The tree is a huge black walnut tree near Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon. This kind of tree is great to have near curbs, because the huge walnuts that drop off the branches will often make a memorable resonant thump on unsuspecting cars and passers by. You can view with quicktime or with shockwave. |
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 My first panoramic camera mount |
MethodsCurrently, I use a Nikkor 10.5mm fisheye lens on my fancy new Nikon D300, to take 6 shots around, one up, and one down. Sometimes I can get away with 4 around, one up and one down, but it's harder to get full coverage with handheld. When not shooting pictures handheld, I use a simple homemade camera mount that cost a few bucks in parts. Then I use automatic stitching software called Hugin, and usually some final touchups in the Gimp. You really don't neeeed a high end camera and lens to make photos like this, but it does make it easier! The D300, for which I recently blew a bunch of my savings, is a really nice camera indeed! It has a different kind of sensor (cmos) than my D70 (ccd sensor), making it less prone to purple and yellow fringes around high contrast areas, which is VERY convenient. The D300 has a zillion other useful features that make taking photos in a hurry easy. It used to take me 10 to 15 minutes to take enough photos for a panorama. Now it takes about a minute! If only the fisheye lens had vibration reduction!Older methodsIn the beginning, before I knew about automatic stitching software such as Hugin+enblend, I made spherical panoramas with the camera mount shown at left (which cost me about $10 in parts), plus a 2 megapixel point and shoot camera with about a 70 degree field of view. This allowed me to take 30 photos, each photo corresponding to a single face of a 30 sided rhombic triacontahedron. Then, I would use my program Laidout to arrange the 30 separate photos approximately into a net. Then, I'd use the Gimp to manually touch up the 60 edges, usually very labor intensive! Also, owing to my cheap little camera, most of my older panoramas suffered from the camera often focusing on the mount, rather than the scene. Finally, the net could then be printed out, cut, and folded up. See examples below. I now use a simpler mount more suited for automatic stitching software, but it is cooler to have a triacontahedron mount. |
Here are a couple photos I made of Washington Park in Portland, Oregon in summer, 2006. You can download, print out, and fold them up for yourself
into a 30 sided rhombic triacontahedron. I made them with the older methods described above.
I am currently making software to project equirectangular images onto any
flat faced polyhedral surface, but it's not quite ready for action yet.
If you are not on Linux, you could also try the Flexify plugin for Photoshop.
With it, you can produce printouts of spherical panoramas similar to these.
