The folks at USC’s Interactive Media Division have got a cool project underway. Viewfinder. Their stated objective is "to provide a straightforward procedure for geo-locating photos of any kind" and specify that "a 10-year-old should be able to find the pose of a photo in less than a minute". If that still sounds like a bit like technical gobbley-goop, here is the idea: You take a picture of someone in front of a landmark. Now you want to superimpose that photo into a 3D world so that the image is perfectly aligned to the model.

Did that help? No??? OK, then watch their video (below) and you will get the idea immediately.

Tags: google, google earth, panoramic, usc, photooverlay, google maps, mashup, viewfinder

Earlier last month, Adobe had a financial analyst meeting where they demo'd some new technology they are currently working on. Two of the demos were done by Photoshop PM John Nack and both them related to merging images into a composite scene.

Below, is a screen shot from a cool demonstration. Here, John took a series of macro photographed images with selective focus (meaning, there was an extremely shallow depth of field for each image). When all of the images were merged, a composited "in focus" image was produced. But seeing is believing (and easier to understand). So, go to about 19 minutes into the webinar to see this in action.



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Tags: panoramic, photography, photoshop, technology

Earlier this week, OnOne Software announced it has purchased Liquid Resize. This product uses a technique known as “seam carving” to reduce the distortion that typically occurs when manipulating the aspect ratio of an image. If you have not heard of or seen "seam carving" in action, I previously blogged about it several months ago.

To get an idea of what seam carving is all about, read the blog post link above and/or check out this YouTube video below:


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Tags: photography, panoramic, technology

The World Wide Panorama began in March 2004 and has become an ongoing series of events. Photography takes place on the solstices (longest and shortest days of the year) and equinoxes (day and night of equal length). Photographers all over the world are welcome to participate. I have participated five times in the last four years. And this year, I managed to get two contributions included.

I really encourage you to check out the work of all the photographers that have contributed to these projects. Not only did nearly 300 panoramic photographs contribute to these two projects, but most of the images can be seen full screen and all are geo-located on a map of the world so you can see where each image was photographed. A special thanks goes out to the organizers of the world wide panorama effort, as without them these last 17 events would not have taken place.

Wrinkle in Time
19 December 2007 marked the 10th anniversary of this initial event. The original Wrinkle in Time project is considered the first major, collaborative immersive, panoramic photography event. To enter the original event, your panoramic photograph was to be taken at the exact same time as the solstice in one's local area. 10 years later, the original event was commemorated by 165 photographers from every corner of the world taking an immersive, 360 degree panoramic photograph within a 12 hour window before and after the Solstice in the photographer's locale.



Since the Solstice passed at 10:08pm local time on 19 December, I elected to take a picture of Christmas lights in the neighborhood. My contribution for the Wrinkle in Time 2007 event can be viewed on the World Wide Panorama website.

[ View: Mike Morper's Wrinkle in Time 2007 panoramic photograph contribution ]

And for your Google Earth users, all of the photographed for this event can be viewed in Google Earth. Read More...

Tags: panoramic, world wide panoramic, orange county, qtvr, photography

Today, the Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA) held their annual Open House. With two boys that eat, drink and think all things fire fighting, today was all about visiting stations and of course the main training facility of the OCFA. While there, we saw a couple of demonstrations -- a car extrication and a fast attack. The photograph below was shot during the car extrication demonstration conducted by the crew from Truck 9.



To see a version of this panorama you can pan around within, head over to my full screen panorama page.

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Tags: qtvr, photography, panoramic, fire, orange county

For the 15th time, the folks at the Geography Computing Facility at the University of California Berkeley (with the help of a few others) hosted this VR photography event. What began in March 2004 has become an ongoing series of events. Photography takes place on the solstices (longest and shortest days of the year) and equinoxes (day and night of equal length). Photographers from all over the world participate.

This time, over 200 photographers from all over the world contributed images (all shot between 19-23 September 2007) related to the theme of Sustenance.


One of the contributor's to the "Sustenance" VR photography event

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Tags: panoramic, photography, qtvr, world wide panoramic

In case you didn't read about it, a couple of months ago Google introduced a new capability to their Google Maps called Street View. In addition to viewing either satellite images, street map detail or street maps composited on top of the satellite images, now they have a view as though you are on street level. In the graphic below, you can see the corner of Park Avenue and PCH in Laguna Beach.



These Street View maps allow you to navigate down the street by clicking on the arrows in the photograph. What's more, you can pan around (left and right) within the image itself to gain a bit more immersive perspective on that particular location.
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Tags: panoramic, mashup

And now for your viewing pleasure, I give you Orange County, California. OK, not the whole place, but at least a few notable locations such as: San Clemente Pier, Seal Beach Pier, Balboa Fun Zone in Newport Beach, Greeter's Corner in Laguna Beach, Cook's Corner biker bar in Trabuco Canyon and last but not least, the hills around my neighborhood after a pretty good sized fire came through the area.


Click the picture above to view the Orange County, California picture map.

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Tags: google, panoramic, photography, qtvr, mashup, orange county

I got a few more panoramic photos posted this morning. These three include two cubic images -- meaning, these images have a full 360 x 180 degree display. Not only can you pan left and right, but also up and down. And they really look good full screen too.



Here is the Rocket Garden at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This image was created using six photographs shot with a fisheye lens. Four horizontal shots (each at 90 degree increments) one pointing straight up and one straight down. Each of the images was handheld (as opposed to using a tripod and a pano head).

View "Kennedy Space Center Rocket Garden" in fullscreen

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Tags: photography, qtvr, panoramic, travel, florida, california, orange county

Wow. This one is really cool. Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir demonstrate in this video their technique of "Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing."  Basically, these guys have figured out how to keep items in a photograph from distorting when scaling an image horizontally or vertically. The technology looks for paths of pixels that can be removed while causing the least visual disruption. 



Patrick Swieskowski has created a great Flash-based demo so you can see how this all works. Go check out Patrick's Seam Carving Flash demonstration.
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Tags: photography, panoramic, technology

Pretty darn cool. Now in select cities (San Francisco Bay area, New York, Las Vegas, Denver) you can get a “street view” within Google Maps. So I did a search for Moscone Center, clicked on the “street view” button in the window and a new map marker that looks like a person landed on the page. Move the marker to where you want it, and voila a 360 panoramic image of that location pops up.



As you see above, the photograph is pretty darn good. And just like the 360 degree panoramic photos I take, you can click down in the photo and pan left and right to look around in these Google Maps images. Finally, you can also click on the arrows to move up or down the street.

Tags: technology, google, panoramic, mashup

Cook’s Corner - Trabuco Canyon, California: April 2007

Cook’s Corner is a “biker bar” tucked away in a small corner of Orange County California (yeah, the OC) where folks come out to show off their bikes. At any point in time, you’ll find over 50 immaculately painted, shining bikes that would make the guys at OC Choppers impressed. But something tells me, the day jobs these road hog riders require them to wear suits and ties.

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Tags: qtvr, panoramic, california, cook's corner

Chateau Cheneceau - Loire Valley, France: April 2002

Five days after our neighborhood nearly burned down, we found ourselves in the Loire Valley. This is one of the first panoramic photographs I took using a digital SLR. And it is still one of my favorites too.

[ View: See this image of the Chateau Cheneceau in fullscreen ] Read More...

Tags: qtvr, panoramic, travel, france, california, newport beach

Frontier Street Fire - Trabuco Canyon, California: April 2002

There is nothing quite like getting a call from a friend while you are 5,000 miles from home to find out there is a big fire in your neighborhood. Great work by the Orange County Fire Authority saved our whole neighborhood.

[ View: See this image of the Frontier Street Fire in fullscreen ]

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Tags: qtvr, panoramic, travel, fire, bridge

I am finally getting back around to posting some of my panoramic photography. I’m going to start posting back up some of my first photographs. Today’s photographs were taken in 1999 and 2000. I think these are two of the first three I ever photographed. Both of these images were taking with print film, then I scanned the prints. These are known as cylinder panoramas -- meaning, when you view these fullscreen [ US Capitol, Greeter’s Corner ] you can only look left or right. Later, I will post some of my cubic images (these allow you to look straight up and straight down too).  

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Tags: qtvr, panoramic, cameras, travel

Pretty funny. Some guy posted over at MAKE Blog how to make a 360 pano head outta wood for ten bucks. I’m thinking Manfrotto doesn’t have anything to worry about here. But “A” for effort.

Tags: cameras, panoramic

I am participating in a photography contest at the moment. I just got an email this week that my image is in the gallery of images for the contest. No idea if I won or not. I’m not holding my breath I guess I find out in the next couple of weeks.

Here is a link to my panorama of Catherine de Médici's Gardens outside the Chateau de Chenonceau on the contest website. And if you want to see the photograph as a fullscreen, immersive panoramic (aka QuickTime VR), here is another link to the panorama of Chenonceau.

Tags: panoramic

Kekus Digital has introduced a prerelease of a new stitcher called Calico Panorama. In addition to single row panoramic images, Calico also supports multi-row images. Cool. And the best part? You don't need to be an uber propeller head to figure it out. Just load your images and let it do its thang.

As I am writing this, I am in the process of stitching a 14 image single row panorama on my G3 Powerbook. So far so good. Calico does not support fisheye images (go use PTMac for that) however, you can still output 360x180 images if you want from within Calico, your source images must be rectilinear.

Way to go Kekus Digital!

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Tags: photography, panoramic

For the third time, I have contributed to the World Wide Panorama effort. This project is coordinated by the Geo-Images Project at the University of California, Berkeley. On the equinox or solstice, photographers from around the world are encouraged to take a panoramic photograph and contribute it to this project. Each project has a theme by which the photographers are to interpret as they see fit, and contribute accordingly. Click on the world image above to go straight to the Water (the current theme) website. When you get there, each of of the "pin points" is actually the exact location where each of the panoramic photographs was taken. Purty cool.

To see my contribution, click "Read More..." below.

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Tags: panoramic, san clemente, california, orange county

Eric Rougier, who I believe is one of the best panoramic photographers around, has created an absolutely incredible image. This image truly makes you feel that you are flying. I don't want to spoil it for you, I simply encourage you to view his VR photograph of flying over Paris (QuickTime required).

And actually, this is the second time he has successfully captured this amazing feeling of flight. His first effort gives you the sensation that you are floating in the middle of the first level of the Eiffel Tower.

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Tags: panoramic, photography, france

This book details all of the necessary steps involved in panoramic photography: from the production of digital and analog picture sequences, "stitching" using software tools (like REALVIZ Stitcher, VR Worx and PanoTools), all the way to publishing interactive panoramas on the Web (e.g., using QuickTime VR, PTViewer and VRML). The book introduces the production of cylindrical and spherical panoramas, as well as object movies and explains how to link individual panoramas to virtual tours.

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Tags: panoramic, photography, qtvr

The theme for the next World Wide Panorama has been announced. Bridges. It will be held September 18-22, 2004 (the Equinox is on the 22nd).

This will be the third time the The Geo-Images Project from UC Berkeley has coordinated this worldwide effort. For details on how to participate, the official website will be updated shortly.

Check Out the Last Two World Wide Efforts
On Saturday, March 20, 2004 more than 180 photographers in 40 countries around the world celebrated the Equinox by creating VR panoramas. This site showcases the results of their efforts.

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Tags: world wide panoramic, panoramic, photography, qtvr

After seeing the images Hans Nyberg stitched together of the moon landings, I decided to go up to the NASA website and see what else they had posted. As it turns out, there is tons of stuff. What I thought was particularly cool was this image above (click on it to see a larger view) produced by a set of cameras with a slight offset to create this anaglyphic image. Get those 3D glasses out (you can buy 'em at that link--$2 with PayPal) and checkout the Mars surface in 3D!

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Tags: qtvr, nasa, panoramic, photography, visualization

The Panoram 4D that I purchased a couple of months ago is missing the shutter mechanism. The lens itself can swing just fine, but there is no shutter release button or the mechanism to initiate movement of the lens.

If you have an old Panoram 4D that could be sold for parts, please let me know. Thanks for the help!

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Tags: cameras, kodak, panoramic

You have never seen something like this before. Way cool! The first shot is from the Apollo 11 mission (that's the first one to land on the moon for those of you not keeping score). The original photographs were taken by Neil Armstrong. However, a couple of weeks ago, new high resolution scans of these original photographs were posted at the Apollo Image Gallery.



The second panorama is from the last mission (Apollo 17). The original photographs in this panorama were taken by Gene Cernan.



Both of the panoramic images were stitched by Hans Nyberg. Hans has done a great job stitching these images together. He has also provided some great historical information on his site too (when you click on the images above, you'll see what I mean). Finally, be sure and spend some time looking at the great stuff on Hans' site. A truly gifted photographer.

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Tags: photography, panoramic

Perhaps one of the most tedious parts of creating a stitched, panoramic image produced from multiple individual images is identifying the control points in each image pair. What are control points? Basically, control points are locations in two adjoining (overlapping) images that are at the exact same point.



To identify control points, one must have an application like PTMac or PTGui which both have a great user interface for creating the control point pairs (click on the image to see a larger view). To create a successful "stitch" of the source images, there must be a minimum of three control point pairs per set of neighboring images. So in my case, I have 18 source images for this 360 degree panoramic image (18 x 3 = 64 control point sets).

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Tags: panoramic, photography, qtvr, software

I have been looking for a Panoram for some time. It turns out, most Panoram's I have found over the last several years are pretty beat up. This one--the last model Kodak produced, is in pretty good shape. According to Kodak Cameras: The First 100 Years, this model was manufactured from 1899 to 1924.

So what is so special about the Panorams? The camera created a 142 degree wide image on the film by having the lens sweep from left to right during the exposure. To see how the lens moves, I have created a page where you can "grab" the lens and move it back and forth.

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Tags: cameras, kodak, panoramic

A challenge with creating panoramic photographs from multiple source images is blending the images together. Even if each of the source images are exposed at the exact same shutter speed and f-stop, some tonal shift is bound to happen.

Such was the case when I took a 14 image panoramic of the Polihale coast in Kauai last summer. All these images where shot at the same shutter speed/f-stop combination, but I still ended up having some shifts.

The image below was created with these 14 source images, then stitched together in PTMac.



When I first heard about Enblend, I thought it might be a nice addition to my panoramic image creation workflow. Recently, the developer of PTMac created a Mac OS X front-end UI for Enblend 1.3. Called XBlend, it takes as its source multiple TIFF images output from an application such as PTMac. So, I thought I would give it a try.

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Tags: qtvr, panoramic, photography, software

To have your panorama properly stitch together, there are two critical items that must happen:

1. All photos must be taken from the same place
2. All photos must be taken while in alignment with the lens' nodal point

The first rule is pretty straight forward, so I'll skip over that. However, what's a nodal point and why does that matter? Read on...



The nodal point of a lens is the point inside a lens where light paths cross before being focused onto the film plane--or in the case of a digital camera--the CCD. When taking the pictures for a 360 degree panoramic image, you want to rotate the camera around an imaginary line that runs through (or very close to) the nodal point of the camera lens. Failing to do this may result in shifts in the placement of the subject matter in your photos, this is called parallax error. (Graphic to left liberated from the Manfrotto website. See link below)


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Tags: qtvr, panoramic, photography

Before we dig in to the nuts and bolts of creating a 360 degree photograph, we first need to understand what type of image we want to produce--a cylinder or a cubic projection. Huh? What's that? Don't worry, it's pretty easy to understand the differences.



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Tags: qtvr, panoramic, photography

I have been making 360 degree, panoramic photographs for a few years now. When completed, these images provide a unique way of looking