Bill Bumgarner

For the Thanksgiving holiday, we went to Columbia, MO to visit my parents. I grew up in Columbia and have a deep affection for the land of the midwest. There are four very distinct seasons with beautiful aspects to each. The weather also tends to be very unpredictable. We had sunny skies on Monday, 5" of snow on Wednesday, a warm Thanksgiving day, and now it is cold again. Gotta love climactic chaos.

While here, I have been playing with my mom's digital camera. Nothing special -- a generic Fujitsu consume 4MP digicam. It does the job. The camera came with Arcsoft's panorama Maker. The software tends to crash when stitching together lots of images, is very very slow, and it takes over the screen -- both very annoying -- but was relatively easy to use. Actually, it was kind of fun as I would just pass by the computer doing the image processing, adjust a few parameters and let it crank for another 10 minutes.

Very wide JPEG stills can be found in a Missouri Panorama Stills page I tossed onto .mac. It contains both "before snow" and "after snow" pictures. I also converted some of the images to QTVR "movies". They are available on a .Mac file download page. The .mac movie presentation pages don't really deal with QTVR well and the movies are higher resolution than the display frame anyway, so downloading them tends to give a better quality viewing experience. Each QTVR movie has a corresponding panorama on the stills page. Unfortunately, the QTVR movies "start" at the "seam". I would have done 360 degree "movies" but panorama Maker crashes when dealing with enough photos to fully wrap around (unless I trim the number of images down to the point where there are a number of unsightly and incorrect joins).

In any case, my first attempt at such things. I'm going to play with doing more panorama shots. I might try to do one that alternates between snow and non-snow images. I would really like to do some 360 degree images in the woods, too.