North Uist Archaeology 360

An installation featuring my North Uist photospheres, accompanied by English/Gaelic narration & original musical compositions that I recorded, plus drone footage from Uist Film, is now open at the Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre. So if you happen to find yourself in the Outer Hebrides in the next few weeks, do have a look. Maybe buy a book :)

North Uist 360

But fear not if your travel plans for May/June do not include remote islands off the cost of Scotland, as the installation shall live on in a smaller form as part of the larger archaeology exhibition that runs throughout the whole summer!

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Snapmad Canvas Prints

The exhibition that showcases the 360 pano work I did on North Uist last summer, along with video & audio recording work I’ve done since plus some fab drone footage from Andy Mackinnon at Uist Film, launched last night at the Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre in Lochmaddy. Unfortunately I was unable to attend the launch due to a prior engagement down in London, but I’ve been told it went down well!

As well as producing a small photo book via epubli that will be offered for sale in the Taigh Chearsabhagh shop (50 copies should be on their way to the shop soon!) we also wanted to be able to offer prints for sale. Mounting & framing gets expensive pretty quickly, especially when the prints aren’t a common dimension, so I decided to give one of Snapmad’s canvas prints a go – especially as they now offer ‘panoramic’ sizes in 2:1, 3:1, 4:1 & 5:2.

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Continue reading Snapmad Canvas Prints

Bell Pettigrew Museum gigapixel panorama – Skyward

A couple of months ago I shot my second gigapixel panorama, inside the Bell Pettigrew museum in St Andrews, for the Skyward exhibition of Kit Martin’s wonderful cyanotypes that opened tonight at the university’s Gateway Galleries. Visitors to the gallery can use a wireless controller to look around & zoom in to the pano.

View it in its full resolution glory beneath – click the right most icon to go full screen, click & drag to move, scroll to zoom.

St Salvator’s Chapel gigapixel panorama part 3

We finally invested in a KRPano license at work, so now I can show off the gigapixel panoramas I’ve taken in their full resolution glory on the Web :)

Click the right most icon to go full screen, click & drag to move, scroll to zoom – I particularly recommend the stained glass windows, as hinted at in the previous post!

St Salvator’s Chapel gigapixel panorama part 2

After Color Efex Pro refused to properly process the full 47,980 x 23,990 panorama (even on a computer with 64GB of RAM & 4x striped SSDs!) I resorted to splitting the image into 4x pieces with overlap between them to apply the post-processing. Not an ideal situation, but after an afternoon’s work I managed it without any visible joins between the pieces.

One of the next stages is to decide how to host it online so it can be viewed in a browser at its full resolution, letting you zoom right in to the detail. My experiments with Google Maps over the summer revealed a 100 megapixel limit, while Round.me seems to have a 25MB file size limit – neither of which are even close to enough for a 1.15 gigapixel image that is 224MB as a jpeg! So far krpano looks like it is going to be the winner, but we’re going to investigate some other options before we invest in a license.

The Chaplaincy have expressed an interest in using the image in one of next year’s printed booklets, however as with many equirectangular panoramas the image looks rather odd when viewed flat – see the first image in the first post. But having the whole sphere around the camera & so many pixels to play with means that I can use PTGui to produce high resolution rectilinear images of arbitrary orientations. In a rather odd experience, it’s a bit like taking a photo in post…!

Here’s one example – the full size version would be 26,542 x 15,272.

17 Chapel (large) west small

And just to demonstrate the level of detail that the full panorama has, which of course means you can essentially zoom in when framing these rectilinear images in post, if you click the image beneath & view it at full size (1920 x 1080) the magnified section is 1:1.

17 Chapel (large) east detail