Panos, Panos, and more Panos
,m him. My father was a general manager of retail stores, owner of small businesses (photo lab), and was also a photographer. So, in many ways, photography was already in my blood when I was born.
I saw many changes and gimmicks from film to digital. Even today there are a lot of kitsch photography programs, machine learning ticks, filters, and more. These often pull away from the core of an image, from expressing an idea to the viewer. So for me, a lot of photography tools and techniques don't add value to the image - they add crap to it.
Panoramic (Panos for short) pictures were like this for me for years. I have a special 8mm lens, a special tripod mount, and more to do Panos, and it just wasn't my thing. It was always like, wow this is cool, but still not very impressive because the subject wasn't interesting.
That was my opinion of Panos until 3 things happened; then, I saw the value and awesomeness of PANOS.
1.) Drone Panos - getting in the air and getting a pano allows me to communicate to the viewer a sense of travel, a sense of adventure, and so much more. It is not just a building or room where you can look around. Now, with a drone and Panos, I can express (in an image) what the world looks like.
2.) Machine Learning - With Panos, you can zoom in and out (nice) but often limited. I would rather spend a few extra minutes creating the pano to be able to zoom in to capture that detail. However, my current setup doesn't allow this. Welcome, OpenCV, Python, Machine Learning, and a computer nerd. So I can upscale the image and get greater detail, allowing more zoom. If you don't want to do it by hand - I recommend Topaz Gigapixel.
3.) Creative Common Licensing - I am creating this blog because so many people have such GREAT information, yet never share it. What's the point? We live in a world where sharing should be a pillar of a civilized society. One of the reasons we are moving forward as a society is because we can encapsulate information into words, words in books, and share those books with people. Those people can build on our past knowledge, advancing society for everyone. This all dies if we don't share our images, knowledge, and more. So I plan to license all my Panos using Creative Common.
This work is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Please visit the Pano Section - whats your favorite image?