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Back in 2011, I tripped over to McKaskill. Finally seeing it in panoramic format gave me a special jolt of memories!
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Looking at these panoramic shots (which were taken with a tiny Canon Powershot SX210), I'm thinking I should get back into the habit with my better camera. Admittedly a tripod would improve the shots.
This is the cabin at the south end of McKaskill (2011).
If your web-browser is showing the entire width of the image, that's shrinking it down. Try right-mouse-clicking and "Open image in new tab" and them click on the "plus sign" to show the image at full size .. and try scrolling across the full width.
Guess I should excourage the use of panoramas as campsite photos for the PCI Project!
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Thanks for posting those.
I followed your instructions to open in a new tab and click the + sign.
Before I did that, I was like, 'nice.'
After I did that, I was like, 'wow.'
There is something 'immersive' about it that really makes me feel like I'm there, something you don't get from a smaller photo or a video with a different aspect ratio. In addition, because it's not a video, and it fills much of the screen, as a viewer I tend to slow down and get into the details of it.
I'm going to try to take these in future. Good idea for a campsite record.
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I've always enjoyed panoramics or stitched photos in various dimensions. I used to have a free software that would automatically stitch them together and save them but it is no longer supported. Browsing them was always interesting - although my eye was naturally drawn to the 'seams' to inspect them for perfection - I typically was satisfied enough to enjoy the full image.
What took it to the next level for us is when we sent them to a photo-printing site and had board-mounted pictures made of them. We now have five or six of them adorning our walls - with images from the Tetons to Prague city views - it's a great way to enjoy the photographs routinely and reminisce of our visits and views.
The very long and slender images sometimes end up looking a bit odd, so I try to 'double-stack' the images to gain more height and perspective. Regardless, they can make for some very interesting compositions.
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Here's another one. This is from back in 2007 on Booth Lake. The dimensions of this file are 640 x 5308 pixels.
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That one could be repeat-printed on vinyl and used as a wallpaper border! How cool would that be in a gameroom or den?
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Thanks to Brent Taplay for emailing me an introduction to Google's "Photo Spheres". I confess to having fallen way behind on this photographic service by Google. The technology of firstly taking these "sphere" photos and of then of linking them to the Google mapping system is .... well, I'm impressed!
Google provides quick links to each of these photo spheres, which can be incorporated into whichever conventional HTML context one wishes. Each link loads-up into a Google Photo/Map page.
From there one can circle around, up and down the photo sphere .. and also bring up a Google map to occupy the bottom part of the screen. Additional sphere locations are on the map and can be clicked on directly.
In days to come I'll be figuring out how to best use the links in the PCI. But for now I'm simply sharing the links that Brent sent me of the photo spheres created by his friend "MJ".
CS 14 on Ragged Lake
CS 2 on Lake Tanamakoon
CS 16 on Tom Thompson Lake
CS 18 Tom Thompson Lake
CS 15 Tom Thompson Lake
CS 4 on Rosebary Lake
CS 1 on Rosebary Lake
CS 2 on Rosebary Lake
CS 6 on Tim Lake
Unknown Island Campsite on Tim Lake
Little Island Lake (no map on PCI yet)
Northmost of channel/island sites
Little Island Lake (no map on PCI yet)
Southmost of channel/island sites
Little Island Lake (no map on PCI yet)
Northeast Island site
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What a great campsite reference tool. Panoramics are nicer to look at but the level of detail in the 360 is amazing. They seem like they are fairly simple to produce as well. Need to play around with a bit - I assume they are dependent on an external rendering tool to run properly in which case Google could cancel one day. Either way though, I think they'd be a great addition to the PCI.
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The more I look into the Google format, the more I think GordK's comment is right. It looks to me that Google may have drawn back on their support of "Photo Spheres".
I'm getting the impression that only their "Google Pixel Phones" camera app is being supported now. A few years ago a similar app could be downloaded at their app store for any modern Android phone, but now isn't available.
Maybe they want to increase demand of their own phones, on which the app may be pre-loaded? Their "Google+" service (no longer available) may have even created "photo spheres" from uploaded conventional panoramas. Perhaps their "photo spheres" hosting site was getting overwhelmed? Whatever the popularity once was for "Photo Spheres", it now appears to me to have lessened.
Myself, I have a Samsung Galaxy A20 cell phone. I've just explored its camera app's features. They include a "panorama" option which guides one through the taking of a 360 degree panorama which is saved as a conventional JPG. That app has no "photo sphere" option.
Holding the phone in the vertical mode, results in the panorama getting a lot of wide-angle upper and lower detail. The resulting photo file is 2224 pixels high and 7984 pixels wide, and is 6MB in "size". There's little work involved in downsizing that to 880 pixel height and 2872 pixel width, and well under 1MB in "size".
Myself, I think I'll be considering my Galaxy A20 as my easier source of conventional 360 degree panoramas, and perhaps my weighty conventional digital camera/tripod combination as a source of indulgently high definition panoramas.
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Very nice... sort of off-topic, but I wonder how/if three-dimensional trickery works with these sorts of images. I'm thinking Kula 3D here maybe ( - shameless plug, heh heh) but there is other hardware, cameras for instance that are... shaped like basketballs maybe, or a Zeiss planetarium instrument... that record the ground and the sky. I have a View-Master camera but it's never been to A.P., so sad.
The other thing I really like is three-dimensional animals. Here's a picture of my dog (6.5 lb. terrier) hunting elephant in the northern bush. Heh heh. 
Last edited by Roman_K2 (2/09/2021 2:12 am)
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