I am re-publishing an image today.
Not to bore you, but because, at long last, I have achieved something I have been trying to do for twelve months now.

You might have noticed that one of my pastimes is panorama photography.
I started down this road by chance about two years ago.
I was in Wales and stopped at a lay-by near Barmouth. I looked at the scene I'd seen a hundred times before and decided it would be a nice scene to photograph.
I got out my camera and took a series of shots - freehand - wondering if I would be able to stitch them together in Photoshop.
At home I stitched the images together in photoshop and decided:
"Next time, you'll have to use a tripod!"
It took ages to stitch and retouch the finished panorama.

'Next Time' I thought I'd be clever, so I used a monopod instead.
Again, it took me days until I was even almost satisfied with the results.
By chance there was a lot of water in this picture too, which proved to be one of the biggest challenges.
What I couldn't understand, however, was the problem I was having with the perspective.
It was this picture that made me go looking for information on the web.
It took 24 separate cropped images, distorted out of all proportion, just to put the railings together - the whole panorama otherwise only consists of 36 images!

When I finally solved the parallax-distortion-problem with a so-called spherical-panorama-head for my tripod, I thought the logical Next Step would be 'Virtual Reality'.
It has taken me twelve months to get there, but I finally solved all the problems I discovered in that corner too!

Here is my first spherical panorama.
I am very proud of it, so I hope you are duly impressed!



You will need QuickTime to view this one - it is installed on most computers, but you may have to download it.
You can move around the picture by clicking and dragging with the mouse. You can zoom in with Shift and zoom out with Ctrl.