QTVR Panoramas

Main Contents

States
Arizona
California
Colorado
Nevada
New Mexico
Oregon
Texas
Utah
Wyoming

Other Sections
Slot Canyons
Travelogue

Site Search

Photograph Search


Photographs	QTVR Panoramas	Panoramic Photographs	Videos

Source image for the QTVR panorama of Grand View Point, Canyonlands National Park, Utah. Full version.

Arizona - 49 locations
California - 55 locations
Colorado - 7 locations
Nevada - 6 locations
New Mexico - 14 locations
Oregon - 1 location
Texas - 6 locations
Utah - 46 locations
Wyoming - 16 locations

The file size of the QTVR panoramas is dependent on image size, image quality and the zoom level of the source photographs; typical sizes are from 150 - 400 kB for the low resolution image (around 350 x 150 pixels) and 400 - 2,500 kB or more for the high resolution image (up to 1000 x 550 pixels).

Panoramas will next be added for the following locations:

Arizona - Grand Canyon National Park - Desert View
Arizona - Grand Canyon National Park - Lipan Point
Arizona - Grand Canyon National Park - Hermit Trail
California - Eastern Sierra - Mt Gould
California - Lassen Volcanic National Park - Brokeoff Mountain
Idaho - Craters of the Moon National Monument
Oregon - Alvord Desert
Oregon - John Day Fossil Beds National Monument
Utah - Grand Gulch

To navigate in a panorama, use the mouse to click and drag the picture left or right, or the keyboard arrow keys. Press the Shift key to zoom in or the Control key to zoom out.

Click here to download the quicktime plugin necessary to view QTVR files, from www.apple.com.

How to Make a QTVR Panorama

QTVR panoramas of nearby objects require special lenses and center-mount tripods, but landscape panoramas can be made using regular equipment - even a tripod isn't essential though it is best to have one. To take the source photographs, make sure the camera is level, then move it around 360 degrees taking photos that overlap by at least 15%. Most scenes are best shot using landscape orientation, though some with a greater vertical field of view need portrait source pictures, which does of course mean that more images are needed. The number of pictures to cover the 360 degrees depends on the zoom level; for the panoramas on this site, it is between 7 and 12.

Next an image editing program like Adobe Photoshop should be used to change one or more of color balance, brightness, saturation and levels, perhaps using adjustment layers to make sure the overlapping regions are as identical as possible.

To make the actual movies special QTVR software is needed. QTVR is a Macintosh format, though there are also PC versions of the programs. The older panoramas on this site were made using MPW Shell (on a Macintosh), which loads each image in turn and digitally blends the edges - an interactive process, resulting in a single PICT file of the whole scene. This is then spliced and converted to the final QTVR panorama. From 2009, all new panoramas have been prepared using AutopanoPRO and pano2vr; this has allowed the final panorama to be both larger and of better quality.