panorama

After Paris 26 Gigapixels was created, it only made sense that someone would one-up the City of Love. Dubai can now be viewed in a whopping 45 gigapixels, thanks to photographer Gerald Donovan.

With the help of a Canon 7D, Donovan took 4,250 photos. He used a 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L zoom lens at 400mm. According to a blog he wrote last week describing his feat, it took Donovan about three-and-a-half hours to take a full panoramic view for Dubai 45 Gigapixels. Amazingly, he did the shots in 98-degree weather, which made "the camera and lens...… Read more

GigaPan Systems will release a robotic camera accessory that's best aligned with its market of panorama enthusiasts: those who use digital SLRs.

The earlier GigaPan products, the $350 Epic and $450 Epic 100, were for compact cameras. The new GigaPan Epic Pro will accommodate larger SLR cameras, the company said Monday. It's due to ship in April for $895.

GigaPan's devices are motorized camera mounts that automate the process of precisely orientating the camera across an array of positions so the resulting photos can be stitched together into a single, very large shot. A good example of the idea is 26-gigapixel view of Paris, one of a new breed of immersive views of the world. … Read more

This robust application provides several tools to build seamless panorama photos of high quality from a series of individual shots. However, the watermark that's automatically added to images created with the nonregistered version of the app will frustrate some users.

The Panorama Factory launches a compact but nicely designed, relatively uncluttered interface. Two toolbars of buttons sit atop a vertical row of buttons (part of the Stitching Wizard) and a pane for editing and manipulating your photos. Initially the steps in creating a panorama photo appear rather complicated. Perhaps the easiest method for novices to master this app is … Read more

ArcSoft Panorama Maker Pro is a simple and elegant way for users to convert multiple images into one panoramic image. Its sleek design and ease of use place it among the best programs we've seen.

The program's interface is quite sleek and attractive. The first screen that users encounter upon opening the program contains information about how to shoot photos that make good panoramic images, including information about camera settings, tripod use, and photo overlap. Past that, to the left is a tree-structured view of the computer, allowing users to quickly locate the images that they want to … Read more

Microsoft now lets people using its Live Search Maps service get a more immersive view by integrating the company's Photosynth panoramic viewer technology.

Photosynth stitches multiple images together into a 3D view, and people can in effect gaze around from a virtual vantage point. Areas with Photosynth views can be shown in the "explore collections" view of a map that also lets people see photos and other additions to a map.

I found the feature easy to use--even the Photosynth installation that had given me some headaches when I tried it during its early days. I still … Read more

The public beta of 360desktop makes some intriguing promises. "Unlimited desktop space" is one, and the capability to save any part of the Web directly to your desktop is another.

Surprisingly, there's a lot more than screensaver snake-oil here. When you run 360desktop, you get a panoramic desktop with custom widgets. Quit, and you're back to basic Windows. Switching between the two didn't cause problems when tested, although quitting 360desktop completely required killing the process a few times.

A persistent "QuickNav" area in the upper-right side of your screen lets you scroll or … Read more

It's all the latest from the Crave blog with Brian Tong and guest hostess Bonnie Cha. This week they talk about 'Mario Kart' for the Wii, shiny Pebble MP3 players, a dream come true for Panoramas, a touchless remote, and keyboard pants you won't want to be seen in.

Got $45,600 burning a hole in your pocket? Try out Seitz Phototechnik's 160-megapixel 6x17 Digital camera. And save a bit more of your allowance for a lens, too.

The mammoth device is able to take an image measuring 60x170mm, a big notch up from high-end SLRs with a 24x36mm frame. It's got huge handgrips on either side that cry out to be grasped, but it's 18 inches wide and weighs 10 pounds, so it looks either like a great workout or tripod material to me.

It can be purchased with a tablet PC to operate it, … Read more

Good news for photo enthusiasts who wish they could they could use Photoshop Lightroom for high dynamic range photography and panorama stitching: support is on Adobe Systems' radar screen, if not necessarily its roadmap.

That's the word from Kevin Connor, Adobe's senior director of professional digital imaging product management and the executive who oversees Lightroom, Photoshop, and the Digital Negative (DNG) format. I spoke with him Wednesday during the Macworld trade show here in San Francisco.

Connor is intimately familiar with these two fast-changing domains in digital photography. High dynamic range (HDR) photography combines multiple exposures of a … Read more