New and Old Panoramas - Missing in Action

In the year 2008 I set a new personal record for VR photography - I took 1377 panoramas in thirteen states. This expanded the scope of my site to include four new states (South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri) and filled in many gaps.

Usually I spend the fall and winter catching up on the photography that I did during the summer. But this year I kept traveling until mid-October, then started immediately on other projects (the new database-driven site and the WWP Foundation). So the new databased version of the site (launched mid-February) was missing about 900 panoramas taken in 2008.

Additionally, my new site policy is not to publish any panoramas for which I cannot present both standard and fullscreen versions. This immediately eliminates almost everything done on film, mostly taken before 2000. But also there were a few instances (as in Alaska) where I rushed to get standard size versions on the site, and never went back to make fullscreens. The bottom line is that I have removed almost a thousand older panoramas from the site, including most of Alaska and the northern parts of Canada.

My oldest panoramas, done on film, often now have historic value, and I would like to bring them back. Re-scanning the original negative film is a big task, though, so it may not get done completely, or soon. But many panos that I took toward the end of the film era have good scans and it will be fairly easy to re-make them and get them back on the site - all the code is already there in the pages, it is just commented out.

If I bring back a whole batch of old VR's I will mention it in this blog, especially if it restores or completes an entire section. First and easiest to do will be Northern British Columbia, the Yukon and Northwest Territories, then Alaska. After that it gets problematic, with panos scattered throughout the site, and some of them not worth the effort to reprocess (many of them have subsequently been re-photographed).

Similarly, each time I finish up with a group of new panos I will announce it here. I look forward to posting some great new views of Utah, Nebraska and South Dakota from my Oregon Trail trip (taken in July 2008); the redwoods, Oregon coast and Portland from my Oregon Coast trip (August); and Bryce Canyon, Great Basin National Park, the White Mountains, and Owens Valley from my Fall Color trip (October).

My immediate priority, though, is not to rebuild the older parts of the site, but to get back out on the road and take more pictures!