Panoramic Bookshelf: Panorama as Medium

This category of books chooses panorama photography in its most genuine meaning, showing a wide vista (wide angle view, see Wikipedia) that would not fit into a regular image aspect ratio. These books transport the views that you have at elevated viewing point into a book and make the reader experience the view from his arm chair.

Here I have 2 books from this category, both covering the Alps and published in the 1980's.

Swiss Panorama - Emil Schulthess

This book was published first time in 1982 (32 years ago!) and offers a wide range of panoramic views across Switzerland. Most of the images were created in the late 1970's with a huge technical effort. The photographer had to deal with panorama film cameras, helicopters and tailor-made rigs. He gives a summary of the project in the book and I have to pay greatest respect to this achievement to start this project from the scratch with a genius and scientific approach, many years before digital photography was available and people armed with a mobile phone stumbling on mountain peaks shooting panoramas and uploading them 10 seconds later into some image website. 

The book comes high resolution images and great level of details and info about the surrounding area and important points of interest in every image.

Of course this book is out of print but you still get used copies on the usual platforms.

Emil Schulthess lived from 1913 to 1996, his work was given to the Fotostiftung Schweiz, all images below (the images in the book are copyrighted by them)  shall only highlight the book and and entice you to buy your own copy.

Swiss Panorama by Emil Schulthess (1982)

Actual Panorama across 3 pages

Panoramic Bookshelf: Non-Panoramic Panorama Books

While hunting for panoramic books I bought books just by the title. As long it was named "... Panorama ... something" and I could not find any further info about it in the web I would buy it (provided the price is reasonable) hoping for luck. Most of these non-panoramic titles are related to travel, like books about certain places or regions. The word panorama is a bit misleading, seems some publisher or authors want to highlight the broad scope of the book, or it is showing a lot of pictures from many places or something similar.

Here a selection of my non-panoramic panorama books. You won't find a single panorama image in all of these books.

Berlin-Panorama (deutsche Ausgabe) Farbbildband durch die Hauptstadt
Dresden Panorama (deutsche Ausgabe) Farbbildband durch das Elbflorenz 
Rather average picture books, the author published books of many cities and areas in Germany.A bit like must-have-seen in Berlin booklet, to me a random collection of tourist highlights with little detail (text).

Berlin and Dresden Panorama

Naturpanorama Norwegen (Panoramic books) 
Another coffeetable book about Norway from the 1990's. Publisher Ziethen-Panorama (they got panorama even in their name). Nice images but no panoramic views though.

Naturpanorama Norwegen

Ägypten Panorama 
Same as the Norway book, same publisher, same style.

Ägypten Panorama

Berliner Panorama 

This is quite an interesting book because it was published in the former GDR (DDR), in east Germany. Without any independent publishing available even this book had to be in line with the east German ideology and policies. You get the book for less than 10 cents but it comes with bw images from a long passed history. You might notice there are no images of the wall (which was still there in pre-1989).

How to publish a photo sphere to Google Maps ?

You won't. It is not an automated process, there someone (or something?) reviewing the submissions and enable to be shown the Google Map. My submission took about 2..3 days to appear.

Worldwide Panorama 2014: Ruins

The site is live, in its 10th years with the topic 'Ruins'.

 

My contribution after 6 years not joining this, the Hardenburg Castle in Bad Dürkheim.

VR Hardenburg - Treppenturm mit Lilienportal

Views: Hardenburg - Treppenturm mit Lilienportal by Sven Hafner panoramaXL

How to embedd a Photo Sphere

Embedding is straight forward, provided your blog provider does allow embedding of HTML into your posts.

Open the photo sphere you like to embed and click on the share icon.

Open the post where you want to add the photo sphere, switch to html view and paste the html code with the iframe tag anywhere.

The result:

Views: Hardenburg - Ausfallgarten by Sven Hafner panoramaXL

How to upload a Photosphere to Google Map View

Since Google is retiring the panoramio service, is worth to look at the new platform Google Maps View. Of course you are required to create a Google account but that is fairly simple process. I did not manage to upload a photo sphere successfully straight away so I summarize the steps here.

It is not enough to create a equirectangular image and upload as photo under the +.

A panoramic image has to deliver specific Photo Sphere XMP Metadata in order to be recognized by Google as a Photo Sphere. You can either do it manually by tinkering the Exif info of the file with a tool like ExifTool or use the easier way by using this Google App. This is a detour which is not straight forward (unlike other Google tools), I guess they will migrate this feature into the upload process sooner or later.

After this step your photo sphere has not yet been put up for Google Maps. The app only adds the basic meta data to your image. Click on the download to get back the image file. You have to download this image and add the image. Now it will be recognized as photo sphere and properly rendered. Note, it takes a while before it actually pops up on Google Maps (not only in your profile). 

Panoramio shutting down

The image platform showing about 60+ million of images (and spheres), collected since 2005 by thousands of photographers and acquired by Google in 2007 is going to be closed down. 

As reason Google gave is to merge with the View platform, they announced the geo-relevant content would be migrated.

I never uploaded any image to the platform but it was always present in Google Maps, often interesting for places without Street View Coverage. But I have to say the panoramas, they call it spheres, are often of low quality, badly stitched or exposed.

There is a petition going (initiated by the original founders of panoramio), though I doubt Google will listen to it, is a corporate decision, it does not make sense to have competing platforms under the same roof.

This should be a learning lesson about relying on services provided for free, you simply can't assume your work won't be lost or the service available for ever.
In this case Google will certainly try to migrate all content, so you did upload images for many ears in vain.
But there are other cases where services are ceased because they company goes down or the service as such was not successful or profitable enough. Google Orkut is also shutting down. (Discontinued Google Services at Wikipedia)

Wikipedia about panoramio.

Overview Panorama Cameras and systems in 2014

I created an updated overview of digital panorama technology and products at this page.

Gigapan: Lindaunis Brücke

Bridge near the village of Lindaunis in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany (Wiki)

Panoramic Bookshelf: How-to and History Books

This type of books either gives an overview of panoramic photography or guides you through the process of picking up panorama photography.

Here a few books, some of them I own:


Stretch: The Art of Panoramic Photography
by Nick Meers (2003, english)

One of the first panoramic books I ever bought. A very nice collection of panoramic images of different times and an overview of available technologies (at the time of 2003). The book shows pictures of various photographers.

Panoramic Photography
by Lee Frost (2005, english)

A comprehensive walk-through panoramic imaging with mostly film based technology. Here the author solely uses own images.

Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook
by William Rodarmor (2005, english)

A typical how-to book for digitial panoramas solely. Given current tools, already outdated, though the basci concepts still apply.











A few more titles with similar background:

Panoramic Bookshelf

Selection of panoramic Books

I love panorama photography, though it became much more popular and mainstream the last few years because of easy access to the masses. While last time only special cameras could do panoramic shots, today any mobile phone can do it, most of the times with questionable quality but sometimes with decent results.

The greatest achievement for a panoramic image is to be presented as print at the wall, either framed or mounted as dibond print. Another fantastic representation is in book form, usually as coffee-table style books. Over the years I collected some 30 or more panoramic books, and recently I started hunting for panoramic books on the various used-books portals where you can get books at a few Euros which originally cost 10 times more when purchased new. Not quite easy task, as sometime the word panorama as keyword alone does not result in books with panoramic images, but without further hints on sometimes years old books it is a bit like lucky draw.

I will discuss the book categories and the individual titles in upcoming blogs. So stay tuned.

Back in 2014

It has been a while since my last post here. More than 2 years and a move from one continent to another (now back in Europe) in between.

Panorama Photography is getting bigger and more main stream than ever before, though I need to say the number of high quality and pleasing panoramas still is a small percentage only.

The stitching software around is getting matter and progressing, the underlying concept of course wont change, take individual images and stitch them to a large wide panorama or virtual panorama.

If you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_photo_stitching_software, it still list about 30 software packages for various platforms. For me these remain relevant as I still use them:

• PTGui
• Autopano Pro
• Hugin

Amazing are the changes on the hardware sector, we are moving from cameras that could somewhat assemble images to a panorama or sweep a panorama, from panorama heads and robot heads to mobile phones with panorama apps to dedicated panorama devices.  What previously was done by bulky and expensive devices can now be done by a gadget that finds in your hand (thoug at a lower quality one might comment).
Amazing too, many of them are crowdfunded:

• Panono Ball
• Bubl Cam
• Full HD 360 CAM by Giroptic (I am backing this one)
• Centr (I backed, but it failed to reach goal)