This is where I blather

You'll notice that there are a few different shapes and formats to these panoramic views. That's because they each show different approaches to the way that we draw ridiculously broad, three-dimensional spaces onto small, flat surfaces.

I think back to grade school, sitting through a lesson about the old-world map makers, and the methods they devised to project the newly-understood spherical earth onto flat parchment. The point taken away was that there is no perfect way to do it. That's why world maps (usually Mercator projections...remember?) show Greenland and northern Canada as streching out forever. The panoramic views here present the same dilemma. In principle, a full 360 x 180 degree panorama shows the interior of a sphere--think of the inner skin of a beachball--and the problem lies in how we smash and squeeze portions of that beachball into flat rectangles. The bigger the portion, the more sqeezing we have to do and the more "distortion" of some kind we end up with. Look at one of VR views at full "zoom out" and you'll see how the corners stretch like taffy. That's not a fault of the lens or computer. It's one necessarily imperfect method for making that 3-D to 2-D translation.

The panoramics that have irregular edges were shot on the fly, hand-held. In spite of their bumpy outline, their content doesn't look quite as distorted as the full spherical samples, and there are a couple of reasons for that. First, they don't show as much above or below the camera; they're composed of only one row of pictures. Except for the Salisbury Cathedral view, they also don't go around the full 360°. So: smaller bit of beachball equals less "distortion".

Learning to create these panoramics has made me appreciate again how much of photography is tied to issues of perception and uncompromising reality, and how inadequate any method of illustration turns out to be. None of the panoramic views on this page, whether static or "VR", can substitute for actually being on the spot. Nothing on the rest of the site will do any better. But having these tools available gets us a little closer to the impossible. They help our imaginations fill in the missing impressions about what the real spaces could be like.