Progress in Leaps, Bounds, and Rebounds

Since calibrating my Peleng lens, I've been pleased at how satisfying my panoramas have become despite minimal skills in graphic editing. With PTMac, six horizontal shots and one zenith shot usually allow me to create something satisfying with only a few stitching flaws, often just a small section near the zenith or nadir that is ajar by a pixel or two. Perhaps use of a Clone tool can fix such errors, but I'm spending more time shooting and stitching instead.

I need to take the time to create a logo or something to cover the hexagonal nadir hole. Perhaps during the winter holidays that are not so far off.

An additional source of joy is adding hotspots and joining nodes in CubicConnector. Take, for example, this five-node panorama (sorry, it's a max resolution, so 15MB or so), the first for which I've created a (cruddy) map: http://www.rikkyo.ne.jp/~chrisg/Takahatafudou.mov

One thing I've come to realize is my inability to compensate for exposure variation, particularly with outdoor zenith shots: To get a natural sky color, the trees are too dark; natural trees, the sky is washed out. I understand that the key is two exposures of the same shot after which one is more or less laid upon the other. Theory, OK; practice, not yet. So I have, in some sense, progressed enough to see what I lack, a good marker.

I've also got a bit of research to wrap up concerning the number of page hits that QTVR content garners for two "tourist sites" in a provincial Japanese city: one public, one private. The stitching will be finished by the end of November, after which I will upload the content, link it to the sites' websites, then begin calculating pageviews to make comparisons with previous years' visits, virtual and real.