I’ve always been a fan of online panoramas. They give the user a sense of “being there” that you can’t quite accomplish in a photo or video. Until recently, I’d been creating panoramas using a sloppy, “poor man’s” method: shooting on a regular tripod head and using two pieces of freeware to stitch together Quicktime VR movies that didn’t display correctly unless you had the plug-in.

Well, we finally got a Nodal Ninja panorama head, and copies of PTGUI and the Flash Panorama Player. Getting the head calibrated was a bit more difficult than I expected, and shooting with a D2Hs and a 14mm requires a bunch of photos to get full coverage, but I’ve been pretty happy with the results.

My first attempt was at a march on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The audio came out nicely, but I had a few stitching issues, and my “down” images didn’t work out the way I wanted.

I shot another one after a recent snow storm. I walked out into the Connecticut College Arboretum around lunch time, hoping someone might be out for a walk through the snowy woods. I didn’t find any people, but I did manage to capture a nice nature scene, capturing a full 360 degrees in every direction. Audio didn’t work out so well. I was hoping for some nature sounds, but all I could hear was the rumble of traffic on a nearby street.