A screensaver that can make frequent fliers feel at home?

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.

World Wide Panorama: Gardens

I’m not sure how I missed this since I have participated in several of the World Wide pano projects, but I did. I think it has to do with the fact that the WWP people send out notifications about the project via emails and I get so many of them, that I just started deleting them without reading them.

That sucks for me, because I’ve enjoyed shooting panos for this project since early on. And more than that, I’ve enjoyed seeing all the other work of all the other participants. People literally from around the globe shoot and upload beautiful (and sometimes not) panoramic photographs to the WWP site and you can spend lots of time just cruising around and checking them out. Which leads me to the point of it all. The newest project is called gardens and is worth your time.

Each quarter at the equinox for solstice they do a new series, and you’re supposed to shoot your pano according to a theme. Market was one theme, and so forth. So this time around it’s gardens and the interpretations are varied and wonderful, as usual.

Alps Panos

As a fan and frequent poster here about panoramic photographs, I wanted to bring to your attention a series here from the Alps. These are superbly shot by Jan Zieba. Although they do not go 360 degrees around, the scenery depicted here is breath-taking to say the least. There are shots of mountains, glaciers, lakes and oceans…amazing landscapes. Some really fine work.

World Wide Panorama Evennt Borders

By the way, I forgot to mention
that the next World Wide Pano event is
happening. I’ve contributed to three or four
of these and find doing them and being a part of this project a really cool experience. The World Wide Panorama
event is sponsored by the Geography Computing Facility at the University of California Berkeley. It’s a non-commercial
project, put together and contributed to by volunteers (like me). I do it to get my
pano work
out there and because, well, because it’s an immensely cool project.

Anyway, every
hemispherical solar quarter (or whatever you call the equinoxes and solstices) they hold a new one, and each time there
is a theme of some kind. This spring the theme is Borders, which can really be interpreted anyway you want. I’ve got my
own interpretation which I’ll post about in a week or so when the site is up and running with all the new
contributions. So here’s what you have to do: you need to go shoot your pano NOW and get it done by the 21st. That’s
the last day. Then you have a week or so to build it and then you upload it to the folks at Berkeley. That simple. I’ll
post more about the project in the coming days. But for now, get busy shooting.

Panos in the Sky

By now folks here are probably
pretty weary of hearing…uh, reading…me extol the virtues of panoramic photography. What can I say? I’m a nut for
them. I think when done correctly, the pano image offers such an unusual and interesting perspective on a
place.

And when done in a documentary way, which I have to say very few people have
been able to pull off, well, whole stories can be told with a single image. See some of the Washington Post’s pano
images to see what I mean. Or take a look at this one I shot
at the ghats in
.

Well, shooting panos from a
helicopter is an approach I had never heard of before, but this site offers
exactly that
, and the results are rather extraordinary. Ed Fink is the pano photographer in the sky. The shots here
are varied, but for the most part all are quite good. From shots of post-Katrina New
Orleans
(which were shot for the Post) to the Mall of America, they offer a really cool view of
places most people never get to see from the sky. There are also some regular old shots from places like Deadwood and St. Paul. The only problem I have with some of  them
is that some have really hokey music attached, so be warned and/or turn your volume down.