The most obvious step in this process was to actually go out to the SRER and collect a wide range of pictures.  The result of these picture taking-trips can be seen throughout this website.  For most images, just taking a good picture and posting it on a webpage was sufficient.  The panoramas, however, required much more work.

Panorama creation:

            I traveled to a desired location and took as many pictures as were needed to make a full 360 degree circle.  For example, I would take a picture and then turn so that the left side of the first picture will be the right side of the next picture.  This process continued until I was once again facing in the original direction.  When I returned to the Lab, I used Photo Vista to mend the pictures into one large panorama.  At this point, the merged picture generally looked fairly rough. Example.

At this point, I used a program called Xres from Macromedia software.  This program has a "stamp" tool which is used to copy areas in one part of the picture to another.  Using this tool, I simply copied other parts of the image that look good into parts of the image that were blank.  Although I am not an expert, I tried to smooth and rough areas so that the panorama appeared as one continuous picture.  Example.

Note: I chose to use this panorama since the sunset is relatively hard to imitate.  As a result the adjustments that I made are still relatively visible if you take a close look.  I tried to be more conspicuous on the other photos contained within this site.

At this point, I loaded the fixed panorama back into Photo Visa and created a 360 degree view by saving picture as a "real space" file.  The result can be seen on the panorama page.
 

Written by Kenneth Jacobson

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