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Fuuuucking hell. Your photography just get better by the day Sara. :D Thanks for sharing!

Very nice Sara :) I loooove panoramic shots, and can apreciate how difficult it is to get a good one, and those all look very good :) I take it you're using the photoshop stitching tool now rather than doing them manually? :) That panorama maker software would let you do your 360° and output as a quicktime vr file, perhaps you could try that.

Thanks Kev :D a lot of practice apparently pays off in photography ;).

Thanks :D. Yeah these were made with the CS3 panorama tool and quite some manual tweeking to fix the errors Photoshop made. There is still a glitch in the 360 degrees one (last one) - just right of the big oval building there's a guy who was walking past duplicated. But I thought it was kinda funny to leave it there ;). I thought about doing a VR with the last one! Should be nice, I'll check that out!

I REALLY like these. Do I understand correctly that you take multiple shots and then load them into a program that does panoramas? Or is it still Photoshop? I used to do far more photography than I do now and so many of the programs are new - and I have no clue about some of them :(

However - your pictures spark my interest enough that I might like to go back to this. Can you describe the process a little bit?

Kathleen, the latest version of Photoshop (CS3/10) has an automated stitching feature. You can take your series of shots rotated around a fixed point, best a tripod, and as long as there's enough over-lap then the program will stitch them together for you.
Depending on how you take them, something which can take practise to achieve well, you can get near perfect stitching. Even with a tripod you can get parallex errors, which is why you can buy custom tripod panoramic heads - albeit at quite an expense.

Here is a 360° panorama that I took from Blackpool's North Pier. I think this was 16 shots. I find that anything less than 15 doesn't give enough overlap.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/209/5...30dfb857_b.jpg

If you get a good one like that you can even manage to make them into spheres. This was just a photoshop filter, I think it is called 'polar co-ordinates'. You have to rotate your image 180°, expand it to a square (lose the original pixel ratio) and the filter produces this result.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/224/5...5dcf7a4517.jpg

I also use a program called 'Panorama Maker Pro' which is just as simple to use, and lets you output as Quicktime VR.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/9n4rzp

All of this was done in Photoshop actually. Photoshop CS3 to be precise, the latest one - I think the previous versions don't have the panorama function yet.

I did indeed make these by taking multiple shots. Typically starting on the left or right end of what will be your panorama, and panning to the other end while taking several shots, just like you would normally take a panorama! You can load all images in Photoshop together, select the panorama tool (File -> Automate -> Photomerge), hit the OK-button and Photoshop stitches all images together automatically!

The panoramas I posted weren't just one horizontal row with images, but 3 rows above eachother. You get sort of a fisheye perspective like this. The process is pretty much the same, but you first create 3 separate horizontal panoramas and then you stitch the 3 horizontal panoramas vertically together (again automatically done by Photoshop :)).

You can pretty much use as many single photographs as your computer can take ;).

There are several standalone panorama stitching software outthere, but Neil is the real expert when it comes to these :).

Very cool - thanks to both of you. I recently got CS3 but haven't installed it since I wasn't up to date on what the changes were. I will install and play a little :)

...you and show us what you made of the game :)

If anyone is interested, here are a few of my favourite of my own panoramic shots (click to view larger)

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/163/3...1eedd4ed00.jpg

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/184/3...cc517a0347.jpg

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/132/3...9eba0574d4.jpg