Project 3: Panoramic Halos

I've been doing a lot of thinking over the break about my third project, and I've decided I want to do something in regards to panorama.  It's a Greek derivative, from πᾶν "all" + ὅραμα "sight", given way to essentially meaning any wide-angle view or representation of a physical space.  In giving thought to this project, I was brought back to a project from Graphic Design 2 where I dabbled with the panoramic image stitching functions that were found in Photoshop.  The quick and dirty Photomerge function aside, the Auto-Align & Auto-Blend functions are very much contenders with many other stand alone programs out there, but they have their limits: fair exposure seem compensation, poor parallax distortion correction, etc.  However, the one limitation I found almost maddening was that I couldn't make the images stitch full-circle, by force or by trick.  And that is exactly what I intend to do for this project: I want to make several "panoramic halos", prints that are true panoramic images that can be folded into a halo and that can be rotated around the viewer's head to view everything seamlessly.  I've been reading up on several sites about how to avoid the nasties, like exposure matching/correction and mounting adjustments to find the nodal point.  I've also been researching the various photo stitching programs available and weighing the pros and cons of what they are and are not capable of.  As of this moment, I'm leaning towards PTgui (Panoramic Tools graphic user interface), it has the greatest amount of user control over the various functions that go into stitching a panoramic image together, plus it would give me another wonderful program to learn and ad to my technical aptitudes.  As far as the mount adapter is concerned, I opted for the Panosaurus 2.0.  She a beaut to look at, sure, but the best parts about it are the informational website support and the incremental measurements that take the guess work out of the alignment process.  As far as the exposure correction goes, that is an easy fix: shoot in Manual mode (as all good photographers should and do!).  My Nikon D5200 has a variety of exposure metering setting that will enable me to choose my manual settings appropriately with out having to shoot and re-shoot and re-shoot and etc. to find a match.  The halos themselves will be the real trick.  I'm probably going to have to suspend the halos from a pulley system (not everyone is the same height and it would be nice to let the viewer drop it down on them and make it an even more interactive experience) and I will need to shoot my images at a high enough resolution so that the image is at a good resolution, yet not hugging the viewer's face so tightly that they get claustrophobic.

Panorama of London, one of the first "panoramic" paintings, by Robert Barker in 1792.

French print of albumen silver photographs taken in 1875 by Holtermann and Bayliss.

Giza Pyramids digital panoramic, created by Rob Armitage.

This is the Panosaurus armature I will be using

A couple of the do-it-yourself armatures.

 

A couple of the pricier armatures out there.

 

A visual assemblage mock-up and a presentational mock-up.

 

A couple of rendered examples of cylindrical panoramas.

Down and Out and Round About

My initial conception for Project 2 was shot down in its entirety.  Aside from the fact that I was unable to get any actors/performers for my project, the biggest letdown was the fact that none of the companies I approached were willing to let me shoot my project on their property.  Oh well, not crying about spilled milk and whatnot, I resurrected my conception search and came up with the idea of making an instructional web page, the focus of which would be animated .gifs that accompanied the instructions.  Just when I got my new idea concreted, I proceeded to end up bed ridden with a severe sinus infection last week, which kept me from coming to class to get the green light from the professor on my new project idea.  But the only thing I hate more than being incapacitated is having to give a bunch of excuses for something I can definitely do something else about.  I will be presenting the local web page in class, but here is a sampling of my .gif work to tide you over until my personal website is up and running to accommodate it:

 

 

*Note: These .gifs are not the best representation of the ones on my web page.  These are compressed and jerked over by Blogger, so they appear choppy and degraded on this page.