The Spinner 360º is a new plastic camera by Lomography that lets you capture 360 degree panoramas on strips of 35mm film.

Shooting involves turning the camera on the handle, which exposes the film through a vertical slit while advancing he film at a speed that synchronizes it with what you’re capturing. You can either turn the camera by hand for longer exposure shots, or use the pullstring built into the handle.

Here are some example panoramas taken with the camera:

Eight panoramas can be captured on each roll, with the image covering even the sprocket holes. The camera is available from the Lomography store for €125.00, or about $150.

Dermandar is a free flash-based web app that will automatically and seamlessly stitch photos together to form a panoramic photo. The resulting panorama can be viewed as a side-to-side scrolling image, or in “3D” mode, which is an interactive display that can be rotated, zoomed, and has a more obvious axis of rotation. Some of the most interesting images available for public view in the Dermandar gallery are actually 360-degree views.

You can upload up to 100 panoramas to the site, comprised of 2 to 4 images for partial panoramas or 7 to 24 for 360-degree images — plenty of photos to allow for overlap as well.

It’s a pretty cool tool, complete with sharing and embedding options. It also has a fullscreen mode that makes the viewing process very immersive.

Head on over to the create page to get started!

(via Lifehacker)

Everything big is Dubai. They boast the world’s tallest building, the world’s largest shopping mall, and now the world’s largest photograph. Gerald Donovan recently created the 45-gigapixel panorama of the Dubai skyline as a technical test to explore the limits of hardware and software. At the end of last year, the largest photo in the world was a 26 gigapixel shot of Dresden, Germany.

Robotic panorama devices are making the creation of gigantic photographs easier and easier. Donovan used a Gigapan EPIC Pro to create his image, along with a Canon 7D and 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L at 400mm. After 3.5 hours of shooting, he had 4,250 JPG images that took up 27.5 GB of his 32GB memory card. If the photograph were to be printed, it would result in a print the size of nearly 1,200 billboards.

Check out the photograph over at Gigapan.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes video showing how the photograph was made:

You can also check out the previous largest photographs in Wikipedia’s article on the subject.

Image credit: Photography by Gerald Donovan

Country-pop darling Taylor Swift has joined the growing list of camera-toting celebrity spokespersons. Swift’s partnership with Sony hit the limelight in January during CES2010, when Swift joined in the Sony press event to announce her use of Sony 3D technology during her current tour.

In a commercial released today, Swift demos the iSweep Panorama feature on the new Sony TX7 Cyber-shot. According to a Sony press release, the ads will air tonight on NBC, FOX and CW, likely targeting  a younger, primarily female demographic — though as the commercial suggests, she’s got a pretty broad fan base.

The camera boasts a number of other noteworthy features including a Carl Zeiss lens, “Exmor R” CMOS censor, HD video, and a touch screen, but Sony says Taylor Swift fans can get extra excited over the limited edition version with the singer’s signature engraved onto the camera.

However, the camera comes at a steep price of $400, which is considerably pricey for point-and-shoots. That’s nearly the cost of six tickets to see Taylor Swift in concert.

It’s quite a coincidence, but two of the largest images in the world were both announced recently. These images were created by taking thousands of individual high-resolution photographs and stitching them together to create gigantic panoramas.

Dresden – 26 gigapixels

The first, and the largest image in the world currently in terms of megapixels, is a panorama of Desden, Germany. It boasts a whopping 26 gigapixels:

It was created using 1,665 individual 21.4 Megapixel photographs taken with a Canon 5D Mk II and a 400mm lens. A robot was used to shoot the photographs, and spent 172 minutes capturing the images. The 102 gigabytes of RAW data that resulted took 48GB of memory, 16 processors, and 94 hours to convert.

The photo was taken on the roof of the building “Haus der Presse” and starts at the left side with the Ostragehege. You can see the Congress Center and the Maritim Hotel rightwards. In the center is the city of Dresden with the famous Semperoper (back view), the castle and the Church of Our Lady. In the background is the television tower and you can identify outlines of the Saxon Switzerland. In the right part you can see the south of Dresden.

Prague – 18 gigapixels

This second image has less gigapixels than the previous one, but is a 360-degree panorama, meaning you can look in every direction:

Hundreds of shots were taken over a few hours, and weeks were spent stitching the image. It was created by Jeffrey Martin the founder of 360cities.

Gigapixel Dresden (via PhotographyBLOG)
Prague TV Tower (via TechCrunch)