Taking your Panoramas online

If you’re anything like me, you at some point discovered a button alowing you to take panorama pictures. Perhaps you try it once or twice, and then you think ‘well, that was fun, now what?’ and promptly forget about it. You did, didn’t you? I knew it.

Finally, there’s a solution… 

The main problem is that photo stitching software is an absolute beast to find, expensive, and often difficult to use. Then, finally, when you have managed to put together a good panorama, it’s impossible to show it to your friends easily. Scrolling back and forth on your screen is nifty enough, of course but… but… but… That’s so un-Web 2.0!

Luckily, there’s a solution. Think of it as Flickr and YouTube, but for panoramas: It’s free to use, has free stitching software, and all that. It’s best trick, however, is its panorama viewer: You can embed your panoramas into your website, YouTube-style. It’s all done in Flash, of course, and any standard browser with Flash built in (that’s 98.49% of you, but I’m just guessing. Proper statistics? Pah!) will be able to look at the panoramas without any hassle. Sounds simple, right? But the stupid truth of the matter is that there’s only one website out there that does this in any sort of satisfactory way…

The website in question is CleVR. No that’s not a typo: sure, they are clever, but the website is called CleVR. Confused? So am I, but then I never quite understood why Flicker is spelled Flickr, so perhaps I’m just dumb. Despite of my relative dumbness, however, I managed to figure out how to use the CleVR site: click a button to make your own panoramas.

The great thing is that there’s a lot of stuff you can do with panoramas as well. You’ve got your classic out-doorsy stuff:

But you can also get creative, like this kind of stuff:

Finally, you can add hot-spots to your panoramas, which means you can link several panoramas together. Try the next one, for example, you can click on some areas for more information, and on others to go to other panoramas. That way, you could conceivably show off your flat, for example, to your mom who lives in another country, and they can click on the doors to move from room to room. Nifty, no?

Anyway, I can’t encourage you enough to go have a look at CleVR. Upload a few panoramas, be amazed by the quality, and be elated that you’ve finally got a good way to share your panoramas on-line!

Small Victories

You’ve probably noticed that the Small Aperture crew is pretty passionate about photographers’ rights. Whether we’re promoting your ability to be able to photographs in public places, ranting about peculiar photographic restrictions, or explaining what sort of authority you can exert over your own images, we’re pretty vocal about things. That’s hardly surprising: we love to take photos. And I doubt we’ll keep quiet until other people, from the police to shopping mall security guards to the general public, really begin to grasp what photographers can and can’t do.

The good news is, though, that over the past week two separate incidents have occurred, albeit over 3,000 miles apart, which have helped to promote photographers’ rights that little bit more.

Edinburgh, Scotland

Last week, in Edinburgh, photographer Stefan Karpa was harassed by security officers while taking photos at the Multrees Walk shopping district. Security had been beefed up recently as a result of several “ram-raiding” robberies. And while Multrees Walk is a privately-owned street, Karpa was photographing from the public highway, which is completely within his rights to do.

Karpa then posted a video of the confrontation to YouTube, and after making its rounds on Twitter, the response was huge.  A few days later, a small group of photographers decided to organise a flashmob at Multrees Walk to protest the incident. Police arrived and watched carefully, but the protest carried on peacefully.

Here’s the video to show you:

Photo Flash Mob on Edinburgh’s Multrees Walk from Tom Allan on Vimeo.

Later, Multrees Walk spokesman Stephen Spray stated that their blanket ban on photography would be reviewed. While not necessarily a legally-successful story, the fact that twenty photographers showed up to protest and photographed the store fronts on private property without being harassed by police and security shows that management is listening and perhaps willing to compromise with photographers.

New York City, USA

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, photographer Antonio Musumeci reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in regards to a lawsuit filed on his behalf. In 2009, Musumeci was arrested while filming another arrest of a protestor outside a New York City federal courthouse. The settlement states that members of the public have the “general right to photograph the exterior of federal courthouses from publicly accessible spaces.”

His primary camera had been confiscated at the time of his arrest, but a secondary camera captured the entire incident. Unlike many protesting photographers, Musumeci kept his cool the whole time, which I’m sure didn’t hurt his case.

While this is a more significant win for photographers than the Edinburgh case, both are equally important during this on-going clash for the right to shoot in public places. As more and more of these types of incidents end with favourable results, it’s only a matter of time before a compromise can be reached and photographers can continue to comfortably do what they do best… shoot pictures.