ere you see my first
attempt at constructing a Quicktime VR 360-degree panorama of Deep Cove, B.C. (452K)
- you'll need Apple's Quicktime installed to view it. As you can see, the seams are much more
visible than in the more recent effort.
The image was constructed from 16 still photographs taken one Saturday afternoon. I walked down to the Cove, out to the end of the pier, set up my tripod and snapped away. I had the camera oriented in "portrait" mode in order to capture more sky and water.
The next step was to scan all 16 photographs in and piece them together into one long image using Photoshop. I didn't try to blend the edges of each "frame" - this was just an experiment, and I wanted the rough edges to show. I used a simple "auto-exposure" camera, which is why the banding is as marked as it is; if I'd used a fixed F-stop throughout, the seams would probably have less noticeable. A digital camera would have eliminated the scanning stage, and there are special tripod heads that would have helped to align the frames. Apple has some free QTVR tools available from its QTVR Web site - I used "QTVR Make Panorama 2" to turn the long image into a panorama. Compare this highly manual process with the merhod I used to construct a more recent (September, 2002) panorama of Deep Cove.
If you're having problems displaying this in your browser, try downloading panoram2.mov and playing it on a Quicktime player for your platform.