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Here’s a sneek peek inside Oakland’s Cathedral of Christ the Light. Although the 190 million dollar addition to the Lake Merrit skyline will not be open to the public until 2:00 PM this afternoon, I was able to sneak in yesterday and shoot a quick panorama.

After scratching my head about the outside of the cathedral for months, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the interior is quite nice. The sparsely decorated cathedral is flooded with a diffuse light warmed by the wood louvers. The cavernous space produces the expected acoustics - you know you’re in church with your eyes closed.

The odd feature though is the ginormous Jesus hovering above the altar. The image seems to be created by light passing through a drilled sheet of aluminum. To my eye, the points of light resemble LED’s on an outdoor advertising display or some kind of giant black and white TV, making the effect seem sorta cheesy. Now, imagine that space filled with a colorful stained-glass window. Yes, that would look better.

These images were shot on the roof on May 7, 2000. A lot has changed since then.

Rendered with AutoPano Pro - this pano never looked so good.

Yes, you’ve seen this location before on this web site. But not 30,000 pixels wide. The HDView plugin makes this previously unimaginable feat entirely possible. Be sure you have the HDView plugin installed, (Sorry, no Mac version yet) then check it out!

When I first used this plugin over at xRez, I was completely blown away. HDView is a must-have plugin! Get it now!

Then, click on this link to get a taste of what’s to come. Amazing!!! So much to be excited about!

It turns out it’s easy to embed a GigaPan Panorama on a web page. Hopefully, this will get more of you to check it out. Be sure to drag the the zoom slider on the left. Or, double-click on a region to zoom in on it. Looks like I have a white-balance problem in this panorama, but the amount of detail in is fairly awesome! Of course, you can always view a full-screen version as well.

This is really my first attempt with a decent camera attached to the GigaPan, so my results can only get better. Hope you’ll come back often for more!

Of course, after looking at the results xRes folks are getting I’m considering other options altogether…

I was lucky enough to have an amazing seat at today’s Giant’s game. I was in row one directly behind the batter at AT & T park. I think I was closer to the batter than the pitcher was! If you look closely in the very center of the shot, you’ll see a Plexiglas window. My seat was just to the left of it - next to the guy in the blue ball cap facing the camera. :)

Being that close meant that I was too close to the field to shoot a decent panorama. So, to get the shot above, I moved about half way back in the stands. And yes, the Giant’s beat the Marlins, 4-3.

My apologies to those of you who have seen pictures shot from the roof before, but this one is different.

What makes this first pano interesting is that I broke all the rules when I made it. I used a very modest camera, and shot in fully-automatic mode. I set the Gigapan rig on a ledge on the roof. The rig was not perfectly level, and had a tendency to wobble. Basically, I setup and shot the pano as quickly as possible to see what kind of results I’d get without trying too hard. Given that the rig used to produce this level of detail costs less than a single mid-range lens for my Nikon D3, I think you’ll agree that the results are pretty darn amazing.

Over the next few days, I hope to shoot more with the Gigapan head and a Canon G7. I’ll compare the results to those from my D3.

I love panoramic photography. Now, I can’t afford one of these very expensive panoramic cameras, so I’ve been creating “poor man’s pano’s” for years by stitching images together - sometimes manually and sometimes with the aid of software. Well, achieving perfect results is becoming a lot easier these days, thanks to a couple of break-through products. The first is AutoPano Pro. This marvelous piece of software creates the highest quality panoramas I’ve ever made. Incredibly, it’s also the easiest to use!

The image above was shot at last night’s Oakland A’s game. I used my D3 with my humble manual-focus 50mm Nikkor f1.4 lens. I manually exposed the images, and did my best to rotate the hand held camera and lens more-or-less around the nodal point while I shot 18 images - 6 columns, 3 rows. The alignment and overlap between the resulting images was far from perfect. Nevertheless I think the results speak for themselves. Even I can’t tell where the images are stitched together! To better appreciate the quality of the results, I strongly suggest you download a higher resolution version of the shot. (5 megabytes) When you examine this image for sharpness, bear in mind that what you’re looking at is one-quarter of the resolution of the full image, which is almost 19,000 pixels wide.

Another amazing product, mentioned here recently, is the GigaPan robotic camera mount. Yesterday, I learned that my begging has paid off - I have been selected to participate in the beta program, (yay!) and should be receiving my very own GigaPan head in a few days. What I’m very interested in learning is whether an 18-30 image pano shot with my D3 will look better in some way than a 100 or even 220 image panorama produced with the GigaPan head and Canon G7.

Oh - and The A’s beat the Chicago White Sox, 6 to 4.

Last night I met with Andrew and his friend Jeff Johnson, the goal being to shoot and perfect the process of creating Gigapan Images with the awesome Gigapan robotic camera head. Luckily Jeff knows everything about this device, and no doubt saved me a lot of time on the learning curve. Our first Gigapan image is a bit shaky (we kept bumping the table during the 15 minute process), but the results hint at what can be created with this combination of a consumer-grade digital camera (Canon G9) and the Gigapan head. Wow!

Having had a chance to learn a bit about this amazing process has me very excited about our trip to Burma. My next goal is to produce the highest resolution images of Burma ever shot.

Here’s a new twist on 360 Degree Panoramas. These are shot from a helicopter. Fabulous!

Andrew took these awesome panoramic shots on a recent vacation trip. The arrangement on the left is the Ring o’ Brodgar, the Stone Circle at Castlerigg is on the right. I don’t know much about how the circles came to be, but then, neither does anyone else.

This is odd weather for September 19th. We might get rained on tonight. Unfortunately, what I had hoped for - a huge thunderhead lit by the setting sun - didn’t quite materialize. At least not from this vantage point. Oh well, the pano quite accurately captures what it looked like.

Look closely. How many vehicles do you see on the freeway moving left-to-right? I see one bus and three cars.

Looks like Cindy got it right! (Excluding the almost invisible cars on the far left of the panorama that Antonio just pointed out to me.) Here’s why “four cars and one bus” is the answer I was looking for. You see the same three cars three times in the composite!