360 panorama

Below you will find application bundles for MacOSX. They contain universal builds and should run on all PPC and Intel based Macs as of MacOSX 10.3.9.

Please note that these bundles are 95% based on 'the works' of Ippei Ukai. You can find his page here.

I never knew this place existed. The hugin project should link here more prominently.

I use a 15mm fisheye lens for when I want to either take in really wide landscapes and later defish and when I want to stitch together a bunch of photos, usually to make a 360 panorama. I keep stopping down to f/8, f/11 or more because I don't want to have a depth of field that is too shallow. But I keep forgetting that the depth of field isn't what I'm used to it being on my 50mm lens. I've also been focusing too far out, since I usually leave it on manual focus (near infinity). What I should be doing, thanks to Depth of Field Calculator, is focusing at, let me hazard a guess, 7 feet with an aperture of f/4 and everything from roughly three and a half feet (which is less than the height the camera is off the ground, so everything should be in focus on the near end) to infinity will be in focus. Not only that, but I'll have a much quicker shutter speed so moving objects won't be as much of a problem. (The site ever so neatly indicates that the hyperfocal distance is 6.2 feet, so my guess wasn't far off.)

I am used to 50mm land, where f/4 at 7 feet will leave everything from 6.3 to 7.8 feet in focus, which is far too shallow a depth of field for landscapes and or 260 panoramas.

After 3 years of research and development and accumulating numerous feedbacks and suggestions from customers and forum members, Fanotec now proudly presents the Nodal Ninja 5--an affordable professional spherical panoramic tripod head for professional cameras and lens.

And it costs $400.

I think the reason that Nodal Ninja became so popular was because it was so cheap, $200. I guess if you've got a big fat 1 series Canon DSLR and the smaller (which I consider a plus) Nodal Ninja 3 wouldn't work, but for everyone else shooting with a Digital Rebel series, 20D/30D/40D series or 5D camera (or their Nikon equivalents) it was great.

There's an article on Slashdot about larger harddrives and, as usual, a discussion on how no one needs to store 4TB worth of data. Ignoring that I might want to download and archive a few seasons of my favorite TV show in high definition, a few hundred albums of music and several movies that I like, there's also the issue of user created content.

The average image in my Aperture library, with all of it's support files and previews comes in around 19 megabytes per photo. Assuming I take 100 photos every time I go out to take photos and go out 40 times per year, that means I'm amassing 74.2 gigabytes per year in photos. Add in a vacation every once in a while and some 360 panoramas and I'm easily at 100 gigabytes per year. (I'm assuming that as photos become larger in size, that compression can keep up. I pretty sure it won't.)

In 10 years time, I will have completely filled up the largest harddrive available on the market currently. And I don't even shoot video clips of vacations or family events. I imagine that if everyone had a small camcorder that was synced with a computer much like digital cameras do now, filling up a terabyte harddrive would be even easier, possibly in three years time, maybe even less.

If all you use a computer for is your basic internet threesome (web, email, IM), then yes, a four terabyte harddrive will be overkill for you. So is the latest processor and graphics card. But if you create 100+ gigabytes of multimedia per year, then a four terabyte harddrive (and maybe a second to keep an offiste backup) might be enough to hold onto all of your photos.