Panoramic ProjectionsHamrånge is the parish on the East coast of Sweden, around 200 km North of Stockholm, where yours truly grew up.
Swedish Wikipedia: sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamrånge_socken Alla tiders: hamrange.se/Alla_tiders/
Parish portal: hamrange.se hamrange.nu
Tourist map: turistkarta_hamrange.pdf
Google Earth: Hamrange.kmz
This website contains 360 degrees panoramic pictures. Links to index pages for various locations within the parish:
Guidelines for browsing the panoramas:
To get a first overview, you can look through the index pages that contain thumbnails (small pictures). E.g. press the link 'Hagsta' above. You can come back to this overview page by pressing 'Back' on the top right of the index page. You can also scroll through the index pages by pressing the 'Next index page', which stands at the bottom of each index page. The scrolling is circular, so you will return to the index page that you started with if you keep going. From any index page you can press the 'Back' link to come back here.
You can zoom in on images and look in all directions. You can watch in different fashions, manually or by automatic slide show. The best feeling of presence is achieved by using a pointing device (such as a mouse). Go to an index page and press the mouse on a thumbnail. The image becomes larger, and straightened out - while the thumbnail can look crooked. Press the mouse somewhere in the picture. Then drag it slightly to the right and to the left. The image will spin around, several turns if you want. Hold down the mouse and drag it slightly upwards to see the sky - even straight up. Drag the mouse slightly downwards to look down at the ground.
If there is a scroll wheel on your mouse, this is the easiest means to zoom in and out. By scrolling one way you can see details at closer range, and the other way makes the view more wide angle. Images can get pretty extreme if zoom out and tilt up or down are combined. In the absense of a scroll wheel, you can hold down the Shift key to zoom in and Ctrl to zoom out.
At the top of a panorama there are a number of underlined links. Pressing either 'Next' or the blue title box will display the next image. It goes in a circle, traversing all index pages of the theme. The link 'Prev' runs the other way.
The 'Index' link is used to go back to the index page where the image belongs. From there you can press the 'Back' link and return to this overview page.
When you have opened a panorama, you can initiate an automatic display:
The 'Slideshow' link starts a slideshow with each image in sequence, in a circle if you do not stop it.
Link '3-slideshow' is my personal favourite. It shows each panorama in three different directions. The ordinary 'Slideshow' shows just one direction.
The 'Rotate' link makes the image that is open start rotating by itself, until you stop it. One revolution takes a minute if you do not set parameters otherwise. If you think it is too fast, there is a somewhat advanced way to set the speed. Press the 'Setup' link, look for the box labelled rot (deg.s / second), enter a value such as 1, and press the corresponding 'Enter' and 'Go to viewer'.
The 'Rot Slideshow' link, with its basic settings spins each picture in turn for one minute. In 'Setup', you can set the rot (deg.s / second) and refresh rate (seconds). If these two numbers multiplied by each other makes 360 (degrees), then each image will rotate exactly one revolution. Thus, one can choose soft or fast motion.
Certain values that you can set with 'Setup' will be retained for other pictures when you scroll on. If this is not desired, press 'clear', found at the bottom of every index page.
Especially with automatic display, you may want to set full screen. F11 often works.
With the 'Still' link, slide show and rotation stop.
Also during a slideshow, with or without rotation, you can press 'Next' or the blue title box in order to speed up and move to the next panorama.
Since there are many panoramas, visiting them all takes a long time. One can consider it an "installation", as works of art are sometimes called, to keep a show running, preferably on a large screen connected to the computer.
Now a little about panoramic photography technology. One must take multiple images, together covering all directions, assemble them with a special computer program (PTGui in this case), and upload them on a website in a special format. It is important that the optical center of the camera lens is held with a precision of centimeters or millimeters in the same place for the various sub-pictures, or otherwise perspectives will be a little different and seams in the composite image will not be exact. There are special tripod heads for the purpose. Unfortunately, I did not yet have one when I took most of these pictures in Hamrånge, so they are taken by hand, which can be noticed here and there. One can retouch, but only to a certain extent.
Each picture first appears in relatively low resolution - this is in order to load it quickly. During a few seconds, depending on the Internet speed, the picture gets sharper, piece by piece.
With this kind of all-around-images, it is more difficult for the photographer to stay out of the picture than to be in it. Therefore, parts of the photographer appear in some pictures. My interest here is more environments than people. If someone recognises herself or himself and would prefer not to be pictured on the internet, I offer to retouch that person out.
There are a few somewhat absurd images that do not really belong to the collection. It is difficult to match the views both ways from a bridge: backyard. But try tilting and turning this picture: Hamrångeån river in Bergby . Every local resident of the parish will see immediately what has been manipulated.
Hope your internet is fast, and that your downloading cost is not too much.
Talking about myself, I find an enjoyment in revisiting locations this virtual way.
I do not write my email address out in plain text in consideration of spam robots. In any case, it is zaid.holmin on gmail.com, or the address you can see in this picture:
Zaid Holmin
(resident in Stockholm, Sweden)