Black & white NASA CoLab panorama

Posted on: August 11, 2007

NASA CoLab

I like to cast "what ifs" into the veins of history: when I visited the inspirational NASA CoLab the other day, with all its shades and nuances — from rockets to an eye-catching checkerboard terrain texture! — I thought,

"What if Ansel Adams was here?"

and imagined him at Kennedy Space Center in the 1960s, capturing the human prowess of technology in addition to nature.

What you see above — and do be sure to click-through to see it in hi-rez — is the result of stitching 66 individual snapshots together, most of them overlapping, to form this 360° panorama. I wrote an earlier tutorial on how to make a panorama in Second Life, if you're curious. After doing that, I didn't just convert to black and white once, but twice. On those two different layers, I split them 1/3 from them top so the skyline could be very "dark cloudish" like some of Adams' work, but even moreso, and provide a fitting foil to the horizon, because the sun is so bright and so is much of the terrain and objects.

I also applied a faint lens blur with some highlights to the top and bottom borders, and since this is meant to emulate old-skool photography, subtle grain was the calling du jour too. Flattened it all out, and here we have it.

In hindsight, I could've (and I know this is entirely feasible because I've done it many times before) added additional lighting over the field, perhaps some godrays, but FWIW, it turned out pretty nice for "brief editing" anyway.

Pretty straightforward for striking results, and a recorded, stylized part of our inworld history. Hope u like. :)

6 Responses to “Black & white NASA CoLab panorama”

  1. Al Sonic Says:
    August 11th, 2007 at 8:30 PM PDT

    That's quite a view =).

    Speaking of panoramas, I've been thinking it's about time someone try out uploading some of these and placing them on the inside surface of some sphere prims (likely with the outside surface made clear). I think that Myst panorama of yours would be a fun example for me to test.

  2. Al Sonic Says:
    August 11th, 2007 at 9:30 PM PDT

    I just gave that idea a shot, and it turned out perfect for spheres! By the way, I remembered that rather than hollow and apply a clear outside, it was much more effective (less troublesome!) to simply invert the sphere, giving it a twist of 180 & 180.

  3. Daedalus Young Says:
    August 12th, 2007 at 4:37 AM PDT

    Al, I've done that too in the past, it works really nice :) Inverting the sphere is indeed better, as the hollow inside doesn't stitch perfectly. It's real fun to rotate the cam around it.

  4. Torley Says:
    August 19th, 2007 at 6:03 AM PDT

    @Al: I saw that comment on Flickr! Thanks!

  5. Sona Chaudhuri Says:
    August 23rd, 2007 at 1:47 PM PDT

    Aloha! would I be able to get your permission to use this image for some of CoLab's promotional materials? Thanks!
    -Sona

  6. Torley Says:
    August 26th, 2007 at 8:08 AM PDT

    @Sona: Oh please sure do, could you please send me a copy of those materials when done? Would luv to see 'em. You can reach me at work, torley at lindenlab dot com

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