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The official Vatican website has a panoramic view of the Sistine Chapel. If you don’t have the opportunity to go and visit it yourself, this could be your best chance to get up close and personal with Michelangelo’s ceiling and the works of other Renaissance artists. Take your virtual tour with or without music. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend
When photographer Darren Samuelson set up to take photos of Manhattan with his massive six foot long view camera that weighs over 70 pounds, authorities were alerted and the police had to be convinced that he wasn’t pointing a weapon at the city!
This amazing device, which Ansel Adams will likely come back from the dead just to get his hands on, was created to use x-ray film three feet wide, and it takes some truly awesome panoramic photos. Hit the link to see a short video of the big daddy view camera in action!
Link –image by John B. Carnett
ps-here’s a link to the artist’s website that I should have included with the article in the first place. Sorry Darren!
Photographer Sean Tamblyn took this magnificent panorama of the skyline of Quebec City, Canada, at twilight, as seen across the River St. Lawrence. The huge (24,345 x 3,303 pixels!) photo is zoomable almost to the point that you can look at what people are doing through their windows. Almost ;)
Link | See also: The Final Shuttle Mission with photos by Sean
(C) Antti Kemppainen
Sometimes nature is more amazing than whatever we can dream up. Though the photo above looks like some sort of special-effects shot from a movie about alien invasion on the Fourth of July, it’s really just a beach in Perth, Australia.
That’s where photographer Antti Kemppainen took this photo, back in January 2007. It was Australia Day and people gathered on the beach to see the fireworks show over the harbor. Meanwhile, lightning was exploding far away, over the ocean. And in the middle of it all, so bright that it would be seen despite the flashes of light, there was Comet McNaught.
Antti just took three photographs and composed them together in a single panorama, so you could see the 180-degree scene that the people sitting there were seeing that day.
Jeff Martin of 360cities has produced the largest indoor photograph ever: a 40-gigapixel, 360-degree image of the main hall of the 868-year-old Strahov monastery library in Prague, Czech Republic. Almost 3,000 images were shot over five days and then stitched together to make the mega-picture. You can take a tour of the picture, swing all the way around, and zoom in on interesting details. Link to image. Link to story. -via The Daily What
It kind of looks like the planets in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, doesn’t it? Photographer Chris Kotsiopoulos created this picture out of many photographs taken over the course of a day in Athens, Greece:
I began the shooting the morning of December 30, 2010, taking photos with my camera on a tripod facing east. The day portion of this shoot is composed of a dozen shots covering the landscape from east to west as well as the Sun’s course across the sky, from sunrise to sunset. I recorded the Sun’s position exactly every 15 minutes using an intervalometer, with an astrosolar filter adjusted to the camera lens. In one of the shots, when the Sun was near its maximum altitude, I removed the filter in order to capture a more dramatic shot that showed the Sun’s “glare.” After sunset, I took various shots with the camera facing west-northwest in order to achieve a more smooth transition from the day portion to the night portion of the image. The night portion is also composed of a dozen landscape shots but this time from west to east. After the transition” shots, I took a short star trail sequence of approximately half an hour duration, with the camera facing northwest. At 7:30, I turned the camera to the north and started taking the “all-night” star trail shots — lasting almost 11 hours. After accomplishing this, I then turned the camera to northeast and shot another short half an hour star trail sequence, and then finally, with the camera now facing east-northeast, I took a series of night-to-day transition shots.
You can view a larger image at the link.
Link via Geekologie | Artist’s Website
Jeffrey Martin shot 8,000 photographs of London and then spent six weeks stitching them together to create this amazing seamless 360-degree panorama of the city. You can zoom in and lose yourself looking at details, or zoom back and admire the city as a whole. The quality of this panorama was impossible to achieve only a year ago -and at 80 gigapixels, it is the largest 360-degree panorama in the world! Open the map to find specific landmarks, or take the tour to see places you’d never think to look for on your own. This is the next best thing to traveling to London, and you don’t even have to leave your desk! Link
(Image credit: Jeffrey Martin, www.360cities.net)
Francesco Bonomi launched a high-altitude balloon last year which took 1144 photos and 15 minutes of video recordings. From that data, he constructed three panoramas (linked at the bottom of the post) from different altitudes. Beware the big black hole in the earth! Link -via b3ta
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You’ve seen awesome panoramas of landscapes, now see something truly different: a panoramic photograph of the inside of a washing machine! Jump inside and take a look around. Try it full-screen for the best experience. And marvel at the socks that will go as matching, but will never be seen together again! Link
Tin House in Gamalakhe Tintown in Margate
If you’ve seen Neill Blomkamp’s movie District 9, the tin house above should be familiar. Indeed, the slum that housed the alien prawns is similar to the Gamalake township in South Africa, down to its purported "temporary" nature.
John Gore of 360 Cities wrote:
“This is a typical Tin House after which this area of Gamalakhe township got its name: Tin Town. Originally erected as temporary housing for these displaced people, these tin houses have become permanent residences for over 20 years. This home owner has been fortunate enough to now have a brick house as well, but the old tin structure is still used as a residency.”
The poverty is palpable – the spartan house has bare walls and floor, and as far as I can tell, open windows (no glass panes). Yet, it’s not completely devoid of technology though the choice of what appliance to have is strikingly logical: a refrigerator. (Compare this to the poor in United States where 91% own color TVs!)
I’ve been a big fan of the panorama photos of Jeffrey Martin of 360Cities for a while now, so I was pleasantly surprised when I learned that he has just taken what could be the world’s largest spherical panorama, an 18-gigapixel shot of Prague.
Here’s how he did it:
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.
Jeffrey was kind enough to invite all of us on a treasure hunt: in a couple of days, he’ll release a set of clues for you to find 30 things in the photo. The first person who got it right will win $1000.
Links: The Panorama | The Treasure hunt – Thanks Jeffrey!
A few weeks ago we were asked to participate in this neat little Sweep Panorama photo contest. Sony provided Neatorama with this sleek and very pretty Cyber-shot DSC-WX1 camera to play with. The task was to take a bunch of panoramic photos and submit them to compete against other photos by bloggers around the web. I'm not a professional photographer by any means, but I sure had fun anyway.
The camera is very little and a real treat to tote around. I am used to lugging around a huge SLR. As long as I am not having a particularly fat day, this compact Sony will actually fit in my pocket. But, the really nice thing about this Sony camera is that I don't feel like I am giving up quality for convienince. Yes, it's really really easy to use but has lots of bells and whistles to boot. The camera is 10.2 mega pixels, has a 5x optical lens, 24 mm wide-angle lens (35mm format), anti-motion blur, take movies and so on. Frankly this little guy is way smarter then I am.
The panoramic feature they asked us to test out is super cool. All you do is set the camera to the "sweep panorama" mode and you are ready to go. The camera shoots multiple images and seamlessly pieces the together into a panoramic image as you move the camera. You can take vertical or horizontal pictures. The fun thing about the mode is that you can fit a lot visually into one picture. The way it scans actually allows you to achieve a certain amount of depth that you can't get with other still cameras.
We are still playing with camera and we have been asked to submit even more photos. We can't tell you which ones we provided but we think you will have a good time looking at everyone's interpretation of the assignment. Check out the cool panoramic photos at WeSay and vote for your favorite panoramic photo today. The winner is allowed to choose which school they would like 10 additional cameras to be given so you are voting for a good cause.
Disclosure: We do get to keep the camera (Thanks Sony and Technorati! It rocks), but the opinion above was 100% ours. There was no pressure to write only positive reviews.
Refuse collector, Kota, Batavia, Jakarta, Indonesia. in Indonesia
Martin Broomfield of 360 Cities took this panorama of a garbage collector/recycler in Jakarta, Indonesia, sitting down surveying his kingdom of recyclables.
It was typical to see garbage men pushing carts (like one behind the guy) filled with mounds of bags of aluminum cans and recyclable plastics when was living there more than 15 years ago. I wasn’t surprised that nothing much has changed.
If the embeddable player above doesn’t work for you, go here: Link – Thanks Jeffrey Martin!
Willy Kaemena took this 360° panorama of the 2009 Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. Hot air Balloons have certainly gone a long way in terms of shapes. Oh, and as far as I know, no Balloon boy hoax is involved in this event
The embed is nice, but the panorama is meant to be exprienced at full screen so head on over to 360 Cities for a much better view: Link – Thanks Jeffrey!
Prague Skyline from Petrin Tower – Gigapixel in Prague
Panoramic photographer Jeffrey Martin of 360 Cities took this 2 gigapixel panorama stitched together from "a few hundreds shots" taken with a camera with a 70 mm zoom lens, handheld from the windows of the Petrin Tower in Prague.
To get a full appreciation of the panorama, first zoom out by pressing CTRL on your keyboard, then zoom back in by pressing SHIFT – Thanks Jeffrey!
Ever wonder how a fish sees its environment? It’s probably pretty close to this panorama by Richard Chesher over at 360 Cities. Be sure to right click and select "stereographic projection" (it’s nearly 360 degree field of view all at the same time).
The photo really doesn’t do it justice – definitely check out the larger version here: Link – Thanks Jeffrey Martin!
Seeing the moais at Ahu Tongariki, Rapa Nui (better known as Easter Island) should be on everyone’s bucket list. But if you can’t make the trip to the Polynesian island – it is, after all, one of the most isolated inhabited island in the world – you can still view the awesome panorama of the statues at 360 Cities: Link – Thanks Jeffrey!
