Zoomable Panoramas
A few months ago, I helped my friend Erik Walker get his company’s portfolio site up and running: Binzen&Walker Photography. Binzen&Walker create beautiful panoramic photographs that, in contrast to mechanized techniques (e.g. GigaPan) are hand-shot and hand-stitched for artistic effect.
It’s a basic and relatively clean Wordpress site, based on an existing theme. Aside from a bunch of CSS changes, my contribution was mashing up a couple Wordpress plugins to create a nice interface for exploring examples of their panoramic photographs. Showcasing such huge images online is difficult because of very limited resolution of computer displays. In real life, a print of one of Binzen&Walker’s prints could easily cover twelve feet of a gallery wall. Online, a zooming and panning interface was needed.
To get this working, I did a simple combination of two existing plugins: Flexible Lightbox and YD-Zoomify. I’m calling it Flexible Zoomify. You can see a screenshot below or click on the images in this portfolio gallery to try it out.
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November 17th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
I really like your images and I like your use of Flexible Lightbox. But, I’d love to hear if you considered any alternatives to Zoomify. I’ve worked a lot with zoomable images and after using other technologies using Zoomify again feels like going back to ancient technology. I find the panning and zooming really clunky and it’s really annoying the way pixels move around when higher-res comes in. I think that the DeepZoom technology in Silverlight is much better in this regard, e.g. this example. If you want HTML only Seadragon AJAX I think still does a better job letting you interact with the image than Zoomify. Not to just promote Microsoft (where I work) technology – if you want to use Flash, the openzoom.org based viewer that these guys are using is also pretty nice.
Do you prefer the the online Zoomify experience to these others, or is it perhaps easier to author Zoomify, or …?
November 17th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Honestly, Zoomify was simply the first thing I came across, and looked like it would be easy to hack into the lightbox I had on hand (which is also one of dozens of lightbox implementations.)
I would definitely use Seadragon AJAX if I were to do this project again. That’s a much better user interaction model than Zoomify, and not requiring Flash is a huge boon. I was using my scroll wheel to smoothly zoom before I even noticed the buttons. Thanks for the suggestions!
November 24th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
release a mashup plugin?