works of wanderlust

Tag: panoramic

  • pano perfect

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Describe the best picture
    you took in 2025.

    I’ve been trying to take the elusively perfect panorama picture since about a week after I got my first digital camera.

    My success has varied. 

    A few years ago the iPhone added the method that I use to this day, which if you’re sitting there reading this thinking, well duh, panoramic photos are just an option in your photos app dummy, then realize that until about a decade ago making panos was an effort of careful planning and then stitching pics together later in a piece of software and, gah! It really was a chore. 

    But it wasn’t until 2024 that I managed to figure out a better way to display them on a website.

    And in 2025 I actually published a wordpress plugin that lets me put panos onto blogs like this one in a way that sort of looks like this:

    So. The best picture that I took this year? It must have been a panoramic, because among the thousands and thousands of pics I took knowing that I had finally got a bit closer to being able to share the perfect pano was definitely a high point.

  • panoramic, three: oculus graffiti

    There is this strange place literally walking distance from my house. 

    The graffiti tunnel, more formally known as The Oculus.

    I say “walking distance” though it did take me over an hour to walk there and an hour to walk home—plus I spent time there taking photos, sketching, making a video and then stopping for lunch on my way home. Three and a half hours later I got home from a little suburban adventuring.

    About twenty years ago now they built a stretch of the city-circling ring road that swung round the southwest corner of the city. At about seven o’clock on the circle the road passes over a little feeder creek. Readers of this blog will be slightly familiar with that creek because we run through many of the trails that weave over and around and past that creek—but north of where the Oculus sits.

    Rather than just build another bridge, some industrious city planner seems to have decided that this would be the future site of some connecting trail linking the neighbourhoods on either side of the freeway, so they build a hulking concrete culvert with a beautiful paved footbridge traversing through the middle and atop the creek… and never connected it to anything. Never. Even twenty years later it’s this seemingly abandoned piece of pedestrian pathway that requires a map and some hiking boots to locate. 

    To be fair, they are doing some roadwork about 500m south of this point now and it is a strong possibility that the lack of connection will be formally remedied in the next couple years—or never—but if it’s going to happen it’s going to happen soon. Or, yeah, maybe never.

    Still. In those twenty years much has transpired under the freeway and much paint has been spent on decorating every reachable surface with graffiti. It is a sight. I mean, if they ever connect it, I’m sure they will repaint it as a stark and boring Industrial City White—but for now, it is a destination for adventure and a sight worthy of some stellar photographic efforts.

  • panoramic, two: art expedition

    I went for a long walk on Friday. 

    I could sense that autumn-proper was ending. I mean, partially this had to do with a coherent ability to look at a calendar and see that as we enter October things tend to sine-wave pretty erratically between bitter cold and the autumn warmth reprise. But in there, all the leaves drop and all that’s left is bare, twiggy trees.

    So I took in the last great day of autumn and went walking near downtown—and I brought both (a) my sketching supplies and (b) my phone with the intention of snapping some photos, both for reference and enjoyment.

    What I got were a few gorgeous panoramas.

    And since I’m in the panorama vibe lately, having uploaded my plugin for review to the WordPress directory, I’m still feeling pretty fly over having given myself some elbow-grease access to sharing these sorts of pics.

    My first view was from Kinsmen park below the high level bridge. I missed the glory shot of the streetcar traversing, but I did sit down here for a while sketching.

    There is little park up at the north end of the high level bridge that is probably on the short list of the most scenic spots of the city. The two bridges with the river valley below and the Uni on the opposite bank. I stood up here for half an hour taking various shots. These were two of my favs.

    Finally, and as admittedly as much as I could use some practice on panoramas involving symmetrical scenes, I spent a while on the legislature grounds trying to snap some architecture pics that did the place justice. Oddly enough, the best pic in that place was in pen and ink. Sometime I surprise myself.

  • panoramic, one: autumn-ish

    If you’ve been reading along, you may already know that about a year ago I went backpacking in the mountains and returned with a whole bunch of great photos. A few of those photos were panoramic pictures.

    This is not a post about those particular photos, but rather the inspiration and adventures into code brought about by those photos. It was an adventure in thinking about image formats, and trying to figure out a way to display them nicely on a website, so when I go out on lovely autumn weekend and take photos like these… I can post them like this…

    Now, don’t even get me started on the image and video orientation debate. Horizontal versus vertical video! The shift from snapshot to square to tall images on instacrap. It’s all bewildering and when they start making wide screen folding phones we’re all going to follow the little red ball to whatever the latest trend is anyhow. 

    I like my 4×6 photo format for the most part. It’s a generational bias, I know, but still—it’s what I like. 

    All that said, the progress of technology over the last twenty-five years to simplifying panoramic, ultra-wide, auto-stiched photography has arugualby turned it into my second-favourite format. (Which probably means Apple will turn it off soon, dammit, I shouldn’t have said anything!) Back when I got my first camera I literally used software like photoshop or single-purpose software to individually stitch carefully captured photos together to make home-brew panos, and they were at best mediocre.

    Now, there is just a mode on my phone. On your phone too, probably.

    Except, back to that format war thing. People like pics that fit on their screens in the orientation that is most comfortable to hold. In other words, pano pics don’t fit nicely at all on our screens. 

    All this is leading up to the fact that when I added a pano feature into my 8r4d-stagram app, it changed my incentive by one hundred percent to take more pano photos. Which of course means…

    I’ve been taking a lot of pano photos lately. And like you’ve seen scattered into this post, I am interested in sharing some of those here on this blog. 

    Where this all led me was to sit down and write a plugin in WordPress to do something that should have been very simple, but look as did, was not something I could figure that anyone else had made: I built the start of a simple plugin to add panoramic photos to my WordPress blog, and display them in a way that lets you think of them like regular photos, but with a little secret hidden off to the side if you are inclined to scroll and nudge with your mouse or finger.

    I released it this morning on Github.