Absolutely breathtaking photo of the Presidential inauguration

by Scott Carmichael on

By now I’m sure you’ve seen your fair share of photo and video material of the inauguration of our 44th President.

The picture you see above it probably no different from any of the other of 1000’s made that day.

There is however one big difference – it is a whopping 1,474 megapixels. For comparison – your home camera probably shoots in 7 or 8 megapixels.

Of course, a massive photo is useless without some fancy tricks to help view it, so click here to view the original, and use your mouse or keyboard to scroll around or zoom in – you’ll be able to zoom in far enough to see who in the crowds around President Obama was bored, and who was freezing their backside off in the frigid DC weather.

The photo was made by David Bergman with a regular Canon G10 camera, mounted on a Gigapan robotic mount. The final image is built around 220 different photos, and took almost 7 hours to create on his Mac.

If you are feeling creative, and want to make your own panoramic photos, you can buy your own Gigapan robotic mount for just $279.

A screensaver that can make frequent fliers feel at home?

by Scott Carmichael on

One of the signs that you are flying too much, is when you can’t sleep in your own bed without the soothing background noise of a jet engine, or when you find yourself looking out your bedroom window and feeling annoyed that all you see is the street, and not puffy clouds.

If you fit that description, then I suggest checking out Holding Pattern “First Class”. Holding Pattern is a screensaver for the Mac and PC that shows panoramic scenery from 57 different flight routes. The program has some of the worlds prettiest shots, including aerial photography of New Zealand, the Sahara, the Great Barrier Reef and Mount Rainier.

The photo you see above, is a real snapshot of how amazing the application looks. True flight junkies can turn on engine noise, set the time zone of the images, the flight path, the cruising speed and even the plane population (imagine being able to turn off seatmates in real life!). If you are lucky enough to have more than one monitor, you can even stretch the view over multiple screens.

Holding Pattern costs just $17.95, but you can get a taste of how nice it looks with their free version, Holding Pattern “Coach Class”. Of course, since this is a free version, you don’t get as many features, and only 15 different aerial views. Once you’ve installed this, you’ll probably be like me, and upgrade to first class right away!

You can download Holding Pattern here, just don’t blame me if you spend all day at work staring at your approach into LAX, instead of getting some real work done.

Panoramic Video Camera?

by Erik Olsen on

Always on the lookout for interesting innovations in panoramic photography I was pleased
to see an interesting post over at DV
Guru about a panoramic video camera. Way back when I was at ABC, a company was shopping around somethiing like
this, but essentially it was a camera pointing up at a spherical mirror, and then the image was run through an
interpolation software that turned it into a 360 image. Problem was, the image sucked.

This version, a panoramic video camera with plywood , is a DIY kind
whereby several cameras are arranged and their images stiched together. A list of videos shows yo the results. Still not great.

Aceh: One Year Later

by Erik Olsen on

The folks at the Washington
Post have done an
extraordinary job covering multi-media-wise the state of things in Aceh, Indonesia, year after the Tsunami.

This really is an extraordinary series of videos, panoramic photos and more. I am constantly impressed by how
the Post does Web multi-media, and they have taken the whole concept a step or two further with this series. Give it a
look, and marvel at how well panoramic photos tell the story of a place. I’m so into this and thrilled to see pano
photography and video get some real attention.