I enjoy taking panoramic photos from time to time. They are especially useful for capturing wide angle images that are difficult to view in a traditional photo. I’ve also experimented with various methods for presenting panoramic photos, including QuickTime VR, which is an excellent tool for navigating panoramas.
Another excellent piece of panoramic photography software is DoubleTake, which has recently been updated to version 2.2. I like DoubleTake because it is one of the easiest and quickest ways to create a panorama from “stitching” a series of images together. While there are more sophisticated tools available, DoubleTake provides a great combination of ease-of-use and quality results.
Presenting panoramic images online is another issue. Panoramic images can be huge, and most online services that offer panoramic photo viewers place limits on how large a file one can upload. One popular site for panoramic images that I’ve recently posted images to is Panoguide. This service provides a fairly good java-based viewer for viewing panoramic images, but it limits uploaded images to a maximum resolution of 8 megapixels. One of the panoramas I recently took at my godson’s graduation at Shawnee Mission North High School was 48 megapixels, so I had to drop down the resolution quite a bit to upload it to panoguide.
But for what it’s worth, below are links to the two panoramas I took at Trevor’s graduation. The first one is a 180 degree cylindrical panorama of the football stadium just prior to the graduation ceremonies. The second is a tighter close-up cylindrical panorama of the graduating class just prior to receiving their diplomas.
If you’ve never used a panoramic viewer before, try clicking on the image in the viewer and moving the mouse around to navigate. You can zoom in and out by using a scroll wheel or using the two-finger gesture on modern Mac trackpads.