In My Old, Epic Days

2004-2007: I remember those years as an epic period in my life as a panorama maker (my epic years). I had started shooting cylinders in early 2002, with a small Olympus, that I stitched with Panorama Factory. Then in April 2004 I jumped into the 5 megapixels (wow!!!) D70  along with the Nikkor 10,5: Everything was different, everything had to be learned. And I was not a photographer nor a designer, just a teacher in a highschool. So I lurked at the Panorama Tools list digests, where people discussed and shared their knowledge and experiences in the most generous way. I tried in return to help with translating into Spanish some pieces of software or website texts and collaborating with my panoramas when I was asked for.

Panoramas making was way harder back then than it is now: software, cameras and lenses have made giant leaps since then. I was (and still am) Windows, I stitched the equirectangular spherical panoramas with PTGui and converted them to QTVR with Panocube, and later with Pano2QTVR (it's name at the time, now "Pano2VR"). After that I uploaded them to the web, a small space in Geocities that only allowed for three or four panoramas that I frequently replaced with new ones. I needed more space and decided to start my own site, www.panoleku.com, in 2005 ('panoleku' means 'panosite' in Basque, and yes, it's going on 20, next year). I must confess that keeping the site alive with the changes in html, CSS, map APIs and the different viewers (QTVR, Deval, Flashpanoramas, KRPano...) has always been a real pain in the neck for me...

The pics to stitch this panorama were jpgs, shot with the D70+ 10.5. their size 6400x3200 pixels. We used to spend the whole months of August in camping tents along northern Spain (trying to avoid heat as much as possible). I did not have a laptop at the time, and the memory card's capacity for a whole month's worth of pics for panoramic purposes was really limited. That's why I shot jpgs.

Why have I chosen this particular panorama ?
First of all, it is one of the very early ones, and it encapsulates most of the spirit of what I was doing at the time and have been trying to explain.
And then, this is one of the panoramas the Sonar (International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Arts) showed in Barcelona, in June 2005. As their catalog put it "...the return of abstraction to the art scene in the domain of the new media has been a constant feature of recent years. This phenomenon having been firmly established, "Randonnée (A walk through landscapism in the 21st century) aspires to move things up a notch by analysing the extent to which landscape art is currently surviving in new media."
I was requested to collaborate with some of my panoramas, which I did. But I was not able to see them there, as the academic year was ending and there was quite a lot of job to be done at school...

Europe / Spain

Lat: 43° 27' 39.066" N
Long: 5° 56' 40.842" W

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: Medium. Nearby, but not to the last decimal.

D70+10.5, tripod, PTGui, Superrune plugin, PS