The full moon rises over the Salton Sea, while rows of dead palm trees stand stoically on Yacht Club Drive in Salton City. You’ll never want to eat tilapia again after visiting the Salton Sea. Dodge the dead fish on the beach in the interactive version below. Move your iPad or iPhone to navigate the pano in this gyroscope enabled version.

Technical details: This image is 4 shots around at 5 degrees up with a Canon 8-15mm fisheye lens at 8mm on an EOS 60D. Each exposure was 90 seconds at f/8, ISO 800. A 5th shot (nadir) was taken to patch the tripod shadow. Shooting 4 around does not require a zenith shot, and results in a resolution of 10,500 x 5250 (55 megapixels). Shooting 6 shots around and 1 up (zenith) yields more resolution, but may not work with long exposures and fast-moving clouds.

This 360 degree night panorama at the Desert Christ Park in Yucca Valley Caliornia shows statues depicting the Sermon on the Mount. That’s the full moon behind the joshua tree on the left. The park was dedicated on Easter Sunday, 1951, and the statues were built out of steel reinforced concrete by an artist named Antone Martin. When I visited the park about 5-6 years ago, the statues still showed damage from an earthquake in the 90′s that cracked some of the concrete, causing the rebar to show in places. The statues have since been repaired. The 360 interactive version of the pano is below, and here’s a gyroscope enabled version for the iPad and iPhone.

 

I was shooting 360º night panoramas up at the abandoned Hill 88 missile site in the Marin Headlands last Sunday. The interactive 360 pano below includes a view of San Francisco and a tall concrete monolith. I was telling one of my friends about a humorous series of 2001: A Space Odyssey cartoons by the artist Will Guy, a.k.a. goopymart, when I shot the pano. An enterprising monkey sells bones to the other monkeys, and they strike the monolith. In a follow up cartoon, monkeys are seen driving a monolith repair van with a bone on the roof.

I was planning to display the cartoons next to the finished panorama, but decided to see if I could just embed the photos directly into the 360! Look for the goopymart cartoons on the monolith in the panorama below. You can also link to two other 360 views from Wolf Ridge right inside the panorama. The virtual tour links work in both the Flash and HTML version of the pano. Looks great on an iPad!

Update April 2013: This virtual tour now includes cross-dissolves between panos, an interactive map, and directional sound that emanates from the monolith (dissolves and sound are not iDevice compatible).

Pioneering the world of full moon abandoned places 360 panoramas with embedded cartoons since 2012.

A waxing full moon. A collapsing radar site in the Marin Headlands. A dragon. Zoom in to see the Bay Bridge, Golden Gate Bridge, and Mount Tam. Here’s a gyroscope enabled version of the 360 for iPads and iPhones.

Technical details: 8 shots with a Canon 8-15mm f/4L fisheye lens at 10mm on an EOS 60D. 6 shots around at -10 degrees, 1 shot up at 70 degrees, and an offset nadir. Each exposure was 75 seconds at f/8, ISO 800. The final resolution is just over 14,000 x 7,000 pixels (98 megapixels).