I’m in Golden, Colorado for three days, doing work for a project needing photography of town and interviews with key city developers and citizens. It is a dynamic place full of active people, and the mountains around town provide more than nice rocks to look at; they do seem to be a key component of the life here.

Many people have recommended the views from one of the mesas (to the east) or the mountains (to the west), so I decided it was time to dust off the Gigapan and see fi I can render some scenes that might be of value to the project. (plus it would get me some much needed exercise).

So this morning I was hiking up the trail to South Table Mesa, which in the morning light did provide a stunning view of the entire town. I was also treated at the top to the sight of some coyotes romping (they said “yo” to me).

Here is the GigaPan scene generated; again the value here above a simple panorama, is being able to zoom in and mark areas, details as “snapshots” – explore this on the hosted scene:

I’m hoping to do one or two more from other perches. My rig (the early beta version of the Epic rig) does okay, but the quality of image I can get is limited to the resolution of my small Canon camera – see the current offerings, which are not cheap, for the Big Rigs at http://gigapansystems.com/.

And apparently there is a GigaPan iPad app that I might have to explore.

I’d not done one in a while (my previous attempts are at http://gigapan.org/profiles/5381/). But I was inspired today to get out, and I aimed to hike up Strawberry Mountain, the peak I see from my back deck (behind the real Strawberry)

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

It was a steep scramble up there, and man I felt my out of shapeness. There are not too many places where the trees afforded a view, but I got a decent spot overlooking town below.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

And I was rusty at the set up- it took like 10 minutes to get the tripod level, and for the life of me I could not remember how to set the exposure and focus lock on my little Canon camera. By the time I did, the good light over town was starting to fade, but I gave it a go anyhow, setting the upper left and lower right corners to get a series of 66 photos.

I took a little video footage with my iPhone so you get a sense of what it does:

The device moves the camera down (columns) and then shifts across and up to the next column, taking enough photos to have the overlap the software needs. I processed them tonight, and crreated a 0.3 Gb image as loaded to the GigaPan site (http://gigapan.org/gigapans/72822/)

It was fun to do this and I look forward to doing some more experiments.

The Earth Platinum Atlast is a big ass book – it measures 6 x 4.5 feet:

Can you imagine the coffee table you need for that thing? Or the book shelves you will have to construct for it? And what other books can you put on the shelf? How do you read it in bed?

All questions that passed through my mind.

Anyhow, they image they asked to use is actually a panoramic GigaPan scene (made of 88 photos) shot on my last day of my Iceland trip in 2008, at Thingvellir, a place at the nexus of earth history (where the earth is forming new material and spreading towards both Europe and North America) and human history where a parliamentary form of government was formed way back in 930.

I was a bit surprised as this one has some noticeable bands (it was so cold I probably forgot or gave up on hitting the buttons to lock exposure). The person who contacted me said it would be used as a page header banner (so not the giant full page image shown above). I doubt I will get a copy since they are only doing 31 printings of the Giant Book.

But when it came time to ftp them an image, I realized that I did not have a single image. The older version of the GigaPan software did not generate one. I eventually got the newer version for $9 and was able to make an image, a 1.3 Gb TIFF. Before I did that, I decided to give Calico 1.4 a try, a Mac OS X desktop software that is a front end for AutoStitch.

Wow, it took about 5 hours to process– and I was glad I clicked the option for a PhotoShop Large Format image, because it ended up at 6Gb (the limit for regular PhotoShop files is 2 Gb). I managed to open it PhotoShop, and save it as a TIFF, which was still 600 Mb.

It was definitely a better quality image than what was produced by the Gigapan software. However, it seemed to have a hole in stitching near the sun, so I made a cropped version, below is a comparison:

(click for full size)

But they said they did not mind the banding and wanted the sky, so I sent them a 300Mb version of the Gigapan created one.

I’ll be eager to see if it still makes the cut- this would be the biggest thing my photos have ever been in.

It also got me interested in getting the Gigapan rig out again…

I took a pit stop on the way to Monterey for NMC2009 to grab some GigaPan scenes near Fisherman’s Wharf. What a lovely clear sunny day it was. First was a shot from the beach catching a lot of the crazy cold water swimmers:

Yes, I got myself in the image….

Next, I took the walkway that extends from the end of Van Ness Avenue that curves out into the water, offering two great views – one of the city Skyline:

I have one more (still slowly rendering) looking the other way sweeping from the Golden Gate to Alcatraz.

These ones are not big because it was really worth only 3 rows of images, and the sweeps are wide (about 180 degrees, so there is that warped distortion. Still, the scenes are rich with detail.

I hope to do a few down here in Monterey if there rally is any free time this week (not likely).

Update Here is the last one from the Bridge to the Brig

But by sheer accidental link clicking from my RSS Reader (am I the last person on earth reading feeds while everyone else tweets their lunch?) I found on a neat site (see below) that you can now embed a gigagpan image.. So here goes one I took in November at the foot of the volcano Hekla:

If you are interested in some applications of the gigapan I can think of few finer that the Geology ones by Ron Schott lots of structures and outcrops to study at many different scales.

The thing that got me (linktribution to David Weinberger) here was a blog on Nano Gigapans, where rather than looking at large open scenes, they have gone the opposite way and have set up detailed scenes of very tiny things, like an SEM image of Blood and Hair — this is brilliant, and has me nostalgic for a part time job I had as an undergrad running an SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) at a DuPont lab.

Hmmm, I am again inspired to take the rig out…

I captured a few in Shanghai last week, and in one day in Hong Kong, got 3 more scenes:

Top of Peak Tram

Hong Kong Construction Site

View from Pier 9

The effect of exploring the online ones (pan and zoom to incredible detail). There’s a wow factor, as I am getting feedback (and then there is Carl Berger who ran out and got his own).

But I am hoping to see if people can think of some more edu-applicable ways of using this technology. There’s more to it than just shooting the images. I’d suggest that just using the existing images as a base of exploration or study might go a long way.

I had a few varied examples I added as links to the session description for my talk/demo at Learning 2.008. I am somewhat convinced a real power of the tool as when the panos are published on the GigaPan site, any user with an account (free to set up) can mark a detailed area found by zooming/panning as a “snapshot” with comments- essentially annotating a complex piece of information.

There is the capability to explore in detail petroglyphs, castles, gothic cathedrals (and enter inside of it via Google Earth), find content via tags…

So if you look at someone’s profile on GigaPan, it shows all the snapshots they have made on different Gigapans and the ones they have bookmarked– so it can be a “portfolio” per se of explorations across the site. So students can use the site as a way to explore scenes, to say, look across images for landscape forms, architecture to compare, aspects of culture from photos of public places.

The folks who came to my session and “posed” for the demo shot at Shanghai Community International School were even talking about the potential for scripting some “story” to be told by characters placed in or moving around a scene.

I’m more than happy to take and post the images, but there’s much more… and to use this rich resource, you don’t need any equipment, just a clever activity to leverage content and the platform that is there.

Got ideas?

I had a small break Tuesday and wandered down Swantson Street to capture an image of the impressive State Library of Victoria– which always fascniated me with the little bit of Twilight Zone sculpture in front – at least I think it is based on the Time Enough at Last episode with Burgess Meredith:

So I tried first for a shot at the front of the library, but it was right into the sun, and I locked in a really poor exposure setting, and had to tweak images individually. I tried to place myself in the image twice, but was off location, so am there just once:

http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=6575

I then set up the rig in front of the library looking across Swantson Street where the light was better, and got this image, which weighs in at 0.47 gigapixels, not even half a gigapan though it was compiled from 112 individual photos:

http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=6606

I’m still learning a lot about using the rig, and am thinking more about ways it might be used with the annotation features on the gigapan web site.

Looking forward to taking more photos in Cairns, Brisbane, and Sydney.