Fortress Hays

It’s been about 4 months since I got my GigaPan robotic tripod head and began taking Gigapan photos. One of my earliest panoramas with the new robotic head was a taken from just west of the southern edge of town and was one of the subjects of this blog post. The earlier panorama had a lot of vignetting because I didn’t have sufficient overlap between the images when I originally shot them. I’ve learned a lot over the last couple of months and so for the beginning of Spring I decided to go out an reshoot that panorama (slightly expanded) for my hundredth GigaPan. Here’s the result…

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Click on the image and use the scroll wheel on your mouse to zoom in and out. You can also move around by simply clicking and dragging on the image. Probably best enjoyed in the full screen version.

I’ve recently had the good fortune to acquire a GigaPan robotic camera mount, which allows one to make highly detailed panoramas. My first attempt with the device resulted in the wide panorama of town from the southwest as seen below. Click on the image to go to the Gigapan site where you can zoom in and pick out details of the town. There is some vignetting in the stitch because I didn’t use enough overlap and I was using the maximum zoom setting on the camera.

Hays, Kansas

My second local attempt turned out somewhat better:

Picken Hall, Fort Hays State University

Any suggestions for other sites around town that would make a good Gigapan?

I shot this panorama just a week or two ago, completely unaware that I was capturing a snapshot in time that would soon be altered. So while this is not very challenging as a “Where in Hays?” [at least, for those of us here on campus], a more interesting question is “What’s currently happening at Jellison Bridge?”

There’s no better way to get a sense of place than being there yourself. But maybe the next best thing (visually) is a spherical (technically cubic) panorama. The image below is produced by stitching together a number of still photographs and published in the Quicktime Virtual Reality (QTVR) format. You can interact with the image by dragging to pan (left & right, up & down) and using the Shift and Ctrl keys to zoom in and out (respectively). This one was shot last summer. I’ll try to post a new QTVR panorama each week. This one’s too easy for a “Where in Hays?”… unless you’ve never been here! No guesses if you’re a local.