Why Panoramas

One of the most frustrating aspects of landscape or nature photography has historically been the challenge problem presented by the location that compels by its totality, rather than one specific "view". Many mountain- or hill-tops present this problem – the pleasure comes not from any one direction, as from the existence of so many directions. You stand, you look, but you know you can't capture the scene or the feeling – except as a series of independent shots that experience tells you won't do the trick, so you put your camera away.

Toronto Island is a good example of this problem. The island is flat, the vegetation is very much what you'd see in any Toronto park. The shoreline that surrounds the island on three sides is low-lying industrial, briefly interrupted by the towers of the Toronto financial district. Yet the Island is lovely, a beautiful juxtaposition of blue and green where interesting sights are always popping up at you. For a sailor, there is also the pleasure of the sailing clubs on the Island. To the pleasure of always provided by the meeting of land and water are added the intricacies and visual curiosities of piers, marine railways, cranes and the multitude of little boats that service the waterfront.

Individually, these sights and views seldom seem worth a picture; they might even seem banal, yet the totality is one you want to capture. This is where Quicktime VR's come in. By allowing you to stitch individual photos into a whole, QTVR allows you to capture whole scenes, to at least get a sense of what the place looked, and to the extent that vision is transferable to emotion, felt like. (VR stands for Virtual Reality, a complex technology to which QTVR's are related by presenting the viewer with the opportunity to look all around and to control the direction of view.)

These photos were taken at Royal Canadian Yacht Club, a club that has been around since 1851 and whose clubhouse dates to the 1920's. It possesses one of the last of the old yacht clubhouses on Lake Ontario, perhaps one of the few in North America, so many of these beautiful and pleasantly ramshackle buildings having proved too difficult to maintain (or to insure). It also has a large marine establishment to haul, launch and service members' boats, and this provides a visually entertaining mix of old and new machines, some engineered, some improvised, to admire. Photos were taken from several vantage points around the club's islands, as shown most graphically on the Map page.

Personal notes

I first saw QTVR demonstrated in San Francisco in the early 90's. Then it was extremely knowledge-intensive, with each scene demanding programming expertise, and costly, mostly because you would have to scan 20 or 30 photos, an expense of a hundred dollars or more for each scene. With digital cameras, that cost is gone, but you do need a wide-angle lens and a special head for your tripod ($400-$600 if you buy it, less if you make it). The learning curve is still steep; it's not now intrinsically so complex, but there is a lot to learn before you get any results. Learning by yourself from web sites is manageable by anyone who is reasonably determined. Some basic information is available on the Camera page.

Incidentally, I don't want to disappoint you, so let's make it plain right away that there are...

System Requirements

To view Quicktime VR Panoramas, you must have Quicktime 5 (or higher version number) installed on your computer. If you have a Mac, you already have Quicktime and the version is probably fine. Quicktime for Windows is available free here.