"Here, boy! Go fetch the camera! Good dog!" Such conversations could become commonplace as panoramic camera balls threaten to become the next offbeat photography meme. Squito appeared on the scene in July, Bubl Technology is already well on its way to producing the Bublcam, and now comes the Panono, which launched its Indiegogo fundraising campaign today.
Sometimes, taking a straight-on photograph is exactly what the situation calls for. But what about those moments when you want a more complete view? What happens when you want to capture everything around you, all at once, in a snapshot or video that is as interactive as Google's Street View? Well, that's when you reach for the Bublcam.
Stunning, breathtaking, gorgeous, take your pick, any number of adjectives would work to describe the world's coral reefs. But, sadly, another word would work as well: disappearing.
As a combination of climate change, overfishing and pollution is slowly destroying the reefs, one project is using panoramic imagery to catalog what's happening and help the scientific community come together to solve this problem before there aren't any reefs left to save.
When you first see the all-new Ricoh Theta, it might remind you a bit of those old Apple remotes. But this is no remote, it's a new-fangled camera that can snap 360-degree panoramas in one click -- no swiping or stitching required -- with some help from the free companion iOS app (Android coming later this year).
There seems to be a growing desire among the networks to give sports fans the absolute best angle of the action when they're watching a game on TV, but what angle is that?
Sunday Night Football is tackling the problem by giving fans every angle with the newly installed FreeD system, but researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute are taking a different approach. With their new OmniCam360, they intend to give you both 360° views as well as the ability to choose whatever angle you like best.
Do you remember the 320-gigapixel photo taken from atop the BT Tower in London? That 360° panorama, shot by Founder of 360-cities Jeffrey Martin, holds the title of world's largest photo. But just because you have the top spot, doesn't mean you have to stop.
Another of Martin's creations, this one shot from the lower observation deck of the Tokyo Tower, has earned him the number two spot as well.
The launch of Android 4.2 in October of last year brought with it the ability to create special 360° panoramas called "Photo Spheres." But as cool as these panoramas were, there was no real way to share them with the exception of a widget Google released a few months back.
Yesterday, all of that changed when Google announced a brand new Google Maps website called Views, built from the ground up for the Android community and their many un-shared Photo Spheres.
One of the great workflow possibilities that was opened up by the advent of digital photography is the ability to easily create panoramic images. It's become trivially easy to generate panorama images, so much so that it's even become an integrated feature into smartphones.
What many photographers may not realize is that there are a number of other interesting results that can be created using panorama creation software, if you just keep in mind what the software is actually doing (and what you are actually telling it to do).
George Lawrence was a commercial photographer with a knack for engineering and business. Born in Illinois in February of 1868, his career reached its zenith in the early 1900s when he took to the skies, creating incredible aerial panoramas using an invention of his called the 'Captive Airship.'
Just a few days old, a new Kickstarter project called "Spinpod" is aiming to improve your panoramic photos and videos through the use of a spinning pod designed for smaller cameras such as smartphones, GoPros and so forth.
When Wellington, New Zealand-based photographer Brady Dyer proposed to his then-girlfriend Emma in …
There's a slew of super-large panorama pictures available on the web, but when was the last time you heard about a picture that spans well over half the diameter of Earth?
Last month, the Library of Congress finally finished a project they started all the way back in 2008: they finished digitizing an archive of 467 panoramic postcards from the early 1900's. All of these postcards are now available online for interested folks to peruse through, learn from and enjoy.
I focus on a relatively obscure (though rapidly becoming more popular) area of photography called gigapixel-resolution photography. I use a robotic panoramic mount to capture tens if not hundreds of images of the same location and then stitch the images together to create a single massive photograph. I've combined this technique with High Dynamic Range imaging to create HDR photographs that are anywhere from 200 megapixels to 4 gigapixels in resolution size.
Want to explore famous New York City locations without leaving the comfort of your chair? Check out photographer Nuno Madeira's New York City 360 project. It's like browsing Google Street View panorama photographs on steroids.
If you've always wanted to feast your eyes on the aurora borealis but haven't had the time or the money to travel to areas of the world where the light display occurs, photographer Göran Strand has a treat for you. He has created an immersive 360-degree panorama using time-lapse photographs shot during a particularly active aurora. The video lets you pan around in the scene, offering a small taste of what experiencing the northern lights feels like.
For a while now we've been sharing photos beamed home by NASA's rovers on Mars. From panoramas by the old timer Opportunity to selfies by the new kid Curiosity, we're starting to see more and more of the Red Planet many millions of miles away. Andrew Bodrov, however, has taken it to the next level.
The latest panorama sent down by NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover is unique in more ways than one. Not only is it a panorama taken on another planet (still blows our minds), it's also been subjected to some post production. The photo -- a piece of which is seen above -- has actually had its white balance modified by NASA to make it look more like it was taken on Earth.
The BT Tower panorama, created by stitching together 48,640 images taken with 7 Canon EOS 7Ds, has officially broken the record for the world's largest panoramic photo. It was taken from atop the BT Tower in London, and you can see a tiny version of it at the top, but the real thing offers a massive, browsable 360-degree view of London in extreme detail.
At the CP+ show in Japan, Ricoh is showing off a new camera prototype its developing that can capture full 360-degree immersive photographs with a singel push of the shutter. The omnidirectional camera looks like a cross between an electric toothbrush and a hammerhead shark. Lift it up into the air, press a button, and it will capture an image that shows every direction around you.
Have you always wanted to see what the world looks like from the top of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest manmade structure in the world? Dubai, UAE-based photographer Gerald Donovan was recently given the opportunity of shooting a photograph from the peak of the massive skyscraper. Not just any ol' photograph, mind you, but an immersive 360-degree panorama that makes you feel like you're actually there!
The image you see above isn't a screenshot from some city-building video game like Sim City. It's a panoramic photograph of New York City captured by Sergey Semenov that recently won Epson's Pano Award for most outstanding panorama captured by an amateur. Check out a high-resolution version of the image here.
Part awesome party-trick, part brilliant idea, the new Cycloramic app from Egos Ventures is about the coolest thing you can get for one dollar on the iTunes app store at the moment. The app -- which will only work with the iPhone 5 -- triggers your phone's vibration at the exact right frequency to make it spin around in a perfect circle. Just stand your phone up, hit go, and keep an eye on your friend's faces (several reviewers called the reactions "priceless").
When the engineering students and staff of King's College in London gathered together to take a faculty portrait, the photographer used an old camera that panned from left to right in order to capture an extremely long panorama of the entire group in one frame. It worked a bit like the panorama features on modern smartphones: start the exposure on one side of the frame, and then gradually sweep the camera across the scene while everyone in the frame stays as still as possible.
Photographer Jeff Cremer recently captured the highest-resolution photo ever shot of Machu Picchu, the most popular tourist destination in Peru and one of the New 7 Wonders of the World. Unlike other gigapixel projects that we've shared here in the past, this one is very well documented, offering an interesting behind-the-scenes look at how these gargantuan images are made.
A botched Photoshop job or a camera app gone wrong? That's the question being asked of one particular photograph that was recently posted to the official Instagram account of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.
Apple may have launched a neat panorama feature with iOS 6, but Google is one-upping the Cupertino-based company today with its new Jelly Bean flavor: Android 4.2. The OS now comes with an official 360-degree panorama app called Photo Sphere.
Google has already photographed quite a bit of our world using a fleet of cars, submarine-style cameras, tricycles, and snowmobiles, so what else is there to include in Street View? Places where vehicles can't go, of course. The company has begun capturing 360-degree imagery using the Trekker -- a special backpack with a Street View camera rig sticking up from the top.
Ever wonder how Google manages to capture street-level photographs of entire cities for its Street View? It's done using a giant fleet of camera-equipped cars. Google employee Masrur Odinaev recently shared this photograph -- taken by a Street View car -- showing one of Google's Street View car parking lots. We see a large fleet of Subaru Imprezas that have panoramic cameras mounted to the tops.
Gabriel Paez is like a one-man Google Street View. On September 21, 2012, the panoramic videographer and iPhone hacker set out from Seaside, Oregon on a journey across the United States to Portland, Maine. Carrying him from place to place was Pucho, his 2005 Vespa PX150 scooter. Strapped to his back was a giant panoramic camera rig designed to capture 360-degree video footage of his adventure "for a live stage show" he's working on.