How I waste my time lately...

I have a pretty obsessive personality and go from hobby to hobby fairly quickly. Here is my latest obsession. Equirectangular panoramas and stereographic projections. These are 360 degrees by 180 degrees panoramas which can be warped into a small looking planet. I think they're really interesting especially because you get to see so much all at once.

To give you an idea of how it is done, here's how it starts. I don't have a very good camera, so I have to rotate 360 degrees around one spot taking 60 to 80 pictures to get the whole panorama. The below image shows those images all together. You might want to click on it to see it bigger. This small, it is hard to look at:


I put those images into a nice little program I have, and it stitches them together to create the Equirectangular Panorama. So then it more or less turns into this:

After the program has combined the images, I have to go in and make some corrections in Photoshop--usually to erase my gut, which you can see a few times in the first image! I was lazy with the above image and only corrected a few parts of it. So there are lots of spots where the stitching doesn't match up, but you get the idea.

Finally, using the same program, I can then turn the 360 degree panorama into a small planet (Stereographic Projection):


I'm also putting up two more that I did a few weeks ago.
Commodore Barry Bridge:


Swarthmore Train Station:


If you want to see more of my little planets, head over to Flickr.

And that is how I waste my time.