Progress: November 14, 2010

While on my field trips, I didn't have extra room for photography equipment, as my tent and camping gear already took up enough space. Plus, the more I piled onto the bike, the slower the ride. I ended up taking photos with an old 35 mm camera without the use of a tripod. As a result, the panoramas of my waypoints were a little uneven, if not wayward. I did not have a consistent point of view. If I saw something of interest, I could not help taking photos in that general area, haphazardly.

Back at the studio, instead of using stitching software, I assembled my panoramas by hand, piece by piece — almost like the process of crafting a patchwork quilt. A slow and imperfect process but fitting: photos didn't always match up, perspectives were skewed, a lot like my unreliable memory.

I was experimenting with new Quicktime VR software (CubicConvertor) on the weekend. I came across what they termed the Vanilla feature: a simple export of the cubefaces in HTML. I was pleased with the effect because it recreated my vision of the Rolling Studio. I liked that I could only see part of the image at one time, as if I was looking out of the window onto a landscape. The YouTube videos had the same distancing effect, but this larger format was more generous in its detail.