4th
About a decade ago, I had a thriving small business doing website design, Flash development, and QTVR tours. I’m not entirely proud of the mix, but it was 1999, and these things were the shit in 1999. I was living in historic Savannah, Georgia, and QTVR tour shoots were lucrative gigs, a lot of fun, and relatively abundant. Aside from basic photography skills, the primary barrier to entry was the cost of purchasing the equipment and software required to make these little gems.
But I was an intrepid young entrepreneur, so I scraped together a few K and got myself a solid Manfrotto tripod, a highly specialized Kaidan head & detent wheels, a Canon Pro IS 90 (2.6 megapixels!) with wide-angle lens attachments, and a couple of software packages (including Apple’s QTVR Studio and RealVIZ’s Stitcher).
I practiced first in the tidal marshes and at the beach - expansive outdoor settings with few edges to muck it up - and quickly learned how to use the equipment to make seamless cubic and cylindrical panoramic photographs. I hired myself out to historic preservationists and the owners of The Lucas Theatre, and made decent money shooting historic interiors. Very quickly, the equipment paid for itself.
Then, in came the competitors. This one company - whose name I can’t, and don’t want to, remember - was offering cylindrical panos for $100 a pop. I couldnt’ compete on price, and as the pano market was commoditized, that portion of my business dried up.
Occasionally, I run across that old Kaidan head in my closet, and I think about putting it up on Craigslist. Maybe someone would want it. Maybe I could get a couple hundred bucks for it - I think - take my girl to Kennywood. Whatever. Then, today, I downloaded Panorama, a simple iPhone app that allows me to take flat panoramic pictures and stitch them together right on my phone. There are no fancy pan and zoom controls on the resulting image. But in 5 minutes, and with virtually no equipment, this 10 dollar app cranks out images that rival what it used to take thousands of dollars and upwards of an hour to produce a few years ago. From here, I can see the last time I’ll catch site of my old tripod head and wonder about putting it up for sale - and it looks like that time has passed.
Unless you happen to know someone in the market.
