keeping up with the Joneses

Holy cow, every so often I come across something that really throws me under the bus regarding the advancements in technology related to photography. This time, it's this site where the University of Wisconsin has geotagged spots along the entire Wisconsin portions of the Great Lakes with 360 panoramic images, among other things, the amount of work here is mind boggling. And then there's the whole Google take on providing a 360 degree view of every street in the country. This is a fascinating tool that I've started to use frequently, but scary as well due to obvious security and privacy concerns, which have already been raised by foreign nations, but not us....? Anyway, great job on this project, UW. Very cool. This will be a site I come back to many times.
So back to technology and photography, there are so many cool things I've been dabbling in recently, including the 360 pano thing. It's not like that Apple commercial where the 4 year old pushes a couple buttons and woila! You have a pano! Well, for certain uses it is, but not for high quality seamless panos. There are many more things to consider, such as figuring out a way to place the optical center of the lens over the center of rotation for panos- to be able to actually stitch the work together. This requires a significant investment in special ballheads and brackets for the shooting phase. There's an artist that does some fabulous 360 pano work out east, Christos Palios. For now, his site shows only a slideshow of a few images, but you get the idea. The Chicago Bean one is actually a piece I might consider buying. Looks like he's got the HDR thing going on as well, but IMHO adds his creative artistic take to the scene.
Here's my first lame attempt at a pano a few years back without elimination of parallax(pretty much the 4yr old kid technique) pretty much why I didn't do much more with this until I gained a better understanding of the process and steps required. And it isn't 360, just a pano, but it was a really cool storm that rolled in over the lake and actually produced a baby waterspout that my neighbor and Brian decided to stay on shore and watch.... they got a good sandblasting out of it to say the least.

lake_superior_storm_pano

When the speed of technological advancement overwhelms me -or- I can't get results that are "as good as film" or am spending waay too much time in front of a monitor, I find myself going back to traditional photographic techniques such as large format film. It's nice to have that option in the bag and understand it's strengths in situations where digital just can't handle the dynamic range or produce good enough resolution, believe me, even a 7K digital body isn't as good as LF film yet, but the advances are significant. BTW I'm not yet a big fan of HDR; I rarely see it done where the image is believable. With LF, how long is film for these cameras going to be available? Let's hope for a long time to come.