bridevalley's photostream  

I adore looking at Landscapes. Being a native of the West-Country, I am privileged to live in a particularly beautiful one and have spent several mildly unsuccessful decades trying to photograph it.

Yes, there has been the occasional happy accident, resulting in a picture that made it on to that year's Christmas card. We even have one or two framed on the wall at home. But largely, my landscape photography experience has been an unremarkable episode; a mild disappointment; a shame but not really life-changing.

Not wishing to give up the photography hobby entirely, and with a renewed interest generated by the change to digital, I kept at it, gently, until I discovered the clever world of 360 degree photography. This was something special – taking home a whole scene; left, right, front, back, even up and down! I'm not claiming any credit for discovering the technology – it almost found me, with the help of a camera, a ball & socket joint, a farm gate and a pair of wellies . . .

Suddenly I had the “wow”, a “how did you do that?” experience which, with the help of some inspirational friends, has developed beyond a hobby into a business. There's a lot of us gone into this - working away at it since 2006 - research, testing, development and bloody hard graft. But we all love doing it. You can see where we've gone with this by visiting the company web site: www.panoscope.co.uk

Many folks would be happy with that little story, and why not? Well, the successful product development with PanoScope Limited required an awful lot of exploring – different processes, formulae, digital photo-processing techniques. We've been round planet Google several times and along the way we came across the odd genius that caught our attention.

Somebody (or bodies), with more time on their hands than us, combined the science of equal angle projection with that of 360 degree photography. Yeah – a scary prospect! And, no, you're not alone if you haven't the foggiest about what it means. All I ask you to do is look at these

and ask yourself a question. No, not “how does he do that?” but “ was it worth it?”

Was it worth spending thousands of hours working out how to make a stereographic, equal angle projection of an equirectangular 360 x 180 degree spherical image?

I think so – and here is your opportunity to find out if you do too!