Top Secret Project Unveiled
Okay, it's far from done, but it's ready for a preview. Now you can visit the TFF any time you want. A few more scenes will be added later, along with a sidebar map so you can see where each scene was shot and click icons to view that location.
http://tours.grandviewvirtual.com/pu.../display/12204
Another board member needs to be thanked...
Glad everybody likes it. George - the one with no initial - sent me a link to some cool panoramas of the Utah desert about 6 months ago. That's what got me interested in researching the process and equipment for doing this, and ultimately lead to my decision to start a part-time business to do virtual tour photography. I don't consider myself particularly artistic when it comes to things like composition - I just wind up with a fair number of good photos because I carry the camera everywhere and shoot like crazy - I took 1400 pictures of my friends' band this weekend to give them about 275 shots that were decent and let them pick the ones they liked from those, and that's always interesting because some of the ones they end up using aren't always my favorites. But the virtual tours rely mostly on having the right equipment and software, picking good days to shoot, and getting the technical aspects like exposure and color balance settings correct. That's pretty easy to develop through practice and experimentation.
Down the road, this TFF tour will link to my business website and hopefully some of the local tourism businesses, but I wanted to give all the board visitors a chance to enjoy it and give some feedback first. I'm still playing with some of the settings - I think I can bump the image quality up a little more, but there's a direct tradeoff between that and download time. I may post a few comparison test scenes this weekend and ask for comments.
Just a little info about the process - it looks like video, but I actually shoot 12 overlapping still photos in a circle with the camera mounted and carefully leveled on a tripod with a special panoramic head that has click-stops every 30 degrees and aligns the camera so that it revolves around the precise optical center of the lens. Then the pictures go into panorama software that stitches them into a seamless 360 degree image and warps it to give the perspective that you're actually looking around in a circle . The original resulting image is about 45 megapixels, but what you're seeing has been reduced to around 6MP if you're looking at the fullscreen version.
Should be an interesting experiment.
The actual images are much wider than that, about 5500x1050. The player supposedly scales to fill whatever screen format you're viewing it on. Let me know how that works - sounds like a cool idea.
Thank You for the Panoramic Views
Impressive!!! Very Well Done Blue Ranger!!! Thank You!!! Jim Kohl
Appreciating the appreciation...
Must be a lot of lurkers on this board - just checked the tour stats and it's had 506 unique visitors since I posted the link last week. More than 20% have been back for a second look, and the average person looked at just over 11 scenes. The initial scenes have been viewed the most, but the ones over in the Bastine area and the Merkle/Big Island Bridge are also getting a lot of views. Much less interest in the Murrays/Bonies Mound area of the Flowage. Also starting to see more visitors coming from various email sites, so thanks to anybody who's been passing it along - share all you want, I don't have any extra costs for traffic.
I'm currently researching terms of use on various sources of map and/or aerial image graphics so I can add a graphical menu that lets you pick scenes by clicking icons on a map. Hopefully that will get done this weekend. Next time up, I'm planning to hit most of the remaining areas so that every part of the Flowage has at least some coverage. Later on, I'll throw in some fall colors and winter views.