Stereographic or "Little Planet" projections are made from 360x180 degree panoramas.
This tutorial shows how it is done.
My own design of photographic gallery
(tutorial here) avoids having
to scroll by using thumbnails which auto-scale in size
according to the size of the screen. All of the thumbnails in any gallery
are visible at once, on any size of screen.
I aim for impact, lighting and sharpness, and to achieve these more often than I do at present!
Motor Racing
My enthusiasm for motor racing began when I saw my first Formula One race at Goodwood in
1962. In the sixties and seventies I was able to get very close to the action while a
Medical Officer at race meetings in Britain and South Africa. Monaco is the only place that
the paying public get as close to a Formula One car as this, and getting really close is
one of the requirements for most great motor racing photos.
Panoramic photographs
Making panoramic prints is one of my main interests. Panoramic pictures are interesting
for two reasons. Firstly they can have a wider field of view than could be produced by a
conventional camera lens. Secondly, combining several images from for example a 10
megapixel digital camera can produce a picture with over 50 million pixels, and captures
far more detail than is captured by any consumer-level digital cameras,
exceeding 35mm and medium format film cameras, and even rivaling large format
film cameras. Pictures can have remarkable detail, better than anything that can
be made with standard film or digital cameras. These stitched images produce
extremely sharp prints at 20 x 30 inches and even larger. Prints as large as this from
single digital camera images typically lack detail and appear soft. Some of my
panoramas have been made successfully from single exposures, but most are made
from seamlessly merging several overlapping photographs to produce a wide (or tall)
highly detailed spectacular picture.
Avoiding parallax
You must rotate the camera correctly during a panoramic series. If you don't effectively
take all the pictures from one point, messy joins are visible because precise merging is
impossible. To avoid these parallax effects a panoramic tripod head must be used to rotate
the camera about the optical center of the lens between exposures.
For this, a Panosaurus
does the job inexpensively. Indoor panoramas, and panoramas with foregrounds
suddenly become possible! There's
a review here. A Nodal Ninja has now replaced
my Panosaurus; it is more portable, has click stops, and is very well made. Max Lyons has
written a review of the Nodal
Ninja here.
Stitching panoramas
Without stitching software it would be impossible to join up the individual images of a
panorama. Perspective would mean that a straight line in one photograph would, in its
continuation on an adjacent photograph, not be parallel to the original. For a good
illustration of this, look at the
Landmarks
of Britain Website.
For stitching software,
Calico
usually works well with panoramas and very large pictures, but it doesn't merge
fish-eye pictures: PTMac
(also from Kekus), a front end for the complex
Panorama Tools does.
All this has changed since I discovered AutoPano Pro.
I've tried all the Macintosh stitchers, but this one outperforms the lot. Control points?
Who needs them if the software does it for you perfectly just about every time, so you
don't need to worry about them at all? Exposing every picture in a panorama
identically? Forget it: AutoPano Pro lets you expose each picture optimally, then blends
them while retaining the shadow and highlight detail. Leaning verticals, horizon not
straight? Easily corrected! This software is well worth the price.
Making QTVR panoramas
I have used two approaches: using krpano and
Pano2VR. Both take a 360 x 180
degree panorama produced by AutoPano Pro, and make it into a QTVR panorama. Both are very
flexible and both will make multiresolution versions which allow great detail while not
needing long page load times.
CubicConverter will take a
360 x 180 degree panorama produced by
AutoPano Pro, and make it into a QuickTime Virtual Reality panorama. You can export
cube faces and edit them to get rid of the tripod, and merge them back in, set the size,
compression, and numerous parameters easily.
QTVR panoramas for iPod/iPad/iPhone
These machines don't have Flash, the commonest (for now) means of displaying 360 degree
QTVRs, so a different approach is required. They (and Macintosh's Safari) do however
recognise html5, and the newest version of
Pano2VR (version 3) will help you
to write the html5 code, and will even allow you to make panoramas which are truly
full-screen on iDevices.
Viewing QTVR panoramas
Macintosh users have it easy: we all have QuickTime. PC users don't, and may be wary of
installing it just to view QTVR movies: the great majority of them do have Flash installed,
so this is a viable alternative. html5 seems to be the way to go, and I use this for all
of my iDevice QTVRs. There is a separate Gallery for iDevice
QTVRs. I use krpano to make and display my other QTVRs in the
QTVR Gallery: iDevice users will be redirected to their
own Gallery.
Zoomify
There are a few different techniques for dealing with the problem of viewing large
picture files on the internet without unacceptably long download times, and there are
quite a few people making extremely large pictures. A practicable technique is employed
by Zoomify: there is even a perfectly usable free
version. Zoomify breaks down very large pictures into smaller files, and the Zoomify viewer
lets you zoom into the picture and pan around it: only a small part of the image is
downloaded at a time. It works very well, and is very fast. I have a
Zoomified Gallery of high resolution pictures utilising this
interesting type of picture, all of which have a full-screen option.
Applying a similar approach to Zoomify to QTVRs allows these to be much larger and contain
much more detail, and yet download more quickly than the usual way. krpano is the way to do
this (the learning curve is steep), and the QTVRs on this site are now more detailed and
download faster than before.
Focus Stacking: infinite depth of field!
Occasionally a piece of software comes along that changes things in a big way. Zoomify
is a good example, and so is AutoPano Pro.
Helicon Focus is another making possible things that you just could not do any
other way: give it a number of photographs of a subject, identical but for the fact that
each one is focussed manually on a slightly different plane, and it will merge them,
using all of the parts that are sharp and ignoring the rest. The end result is a picture
with apparently infinite depth of field. Designed in the first place for photomicroscopy
where depth of field is very narrow indeed, it has many other uses. I have used it for
flower close-ups, and I've been very pleased with the results.
Using a very small aperture can increase depth of field (limited by diffraction), and so
can a view camera or a LensBaby, although that just gives you focus on a slanted plane:
neither can give infinite depth of field, but Helicon Focus can!
Writing web pages and photo galleries
As an html editor, BBEdit
has more facilities than I know how to use. The latest version has built-in multi-file
search & replace, which saves hours. I designed and wrote my own fast way of displaying
galleries of photos, using floating thumbnails and pop-up previews. This makes it easier on
a small screen, as does being able to click on a picture and halve it's size.
Gallery design tutorial
My own unique Gallery design is simple, fast, and works with any screen resolution:
thumbnail images auto-scale so that all of the thumbnails on a page are always visible
without scrolling. There is a detailed
Tutorial showing how this is achieved, using
CSS and a little Javascript.
Little Planet tutorial
I have adapted a commonly-available technique for making 'Little Planet' views so
that it can be used with selected non-panoramic images. There is a detailed
Tutorial showing how this is achieved with both
types of image. With non-panoramic images this can produce impressive and often
unexpected results.
My slide show
This is driven by Javascript, a short, configurable and easy to use piece written by
Andreas Berger.
Thank you!
A big THANK YOU to Lynne who points out my mistakes, and without whose help my site
would not be the way it is now!
Links
Max Lyons
has an interesting site with lots of details about very high resolution pictures,
many beautiful photographs, and uses a Panosaurus panoramic head.
360 Virtual Tours
provide quality low cost 360 Virtual Tours throughout England, Wales and Scotland. We will not be beaten on price for equivalent virtual tours.
