It’s rough–rough!–when a humble photog like me finds himself pursued from city to city by someone much more capable behind the lens.  But that’s the situation in which I found myself last week, when Dzone Magazine editor Hans Frederiks* (brother of Adobe’s own Ton Frederiks) joined us in Amsterdam, then in Barcelona.  I found time to squeeze in a few panoramic shots, but every time I’d turn around, Hans was shooting & had already uploaded images to his blog.  It’s all good, though, and I wanted to pass along a few of his images (stitched together with Photoshop CS3):

• Barcelona at sunrise from the Adobe office.  By the time I arrived, the light had changed, so I settled for shooting the interior.
• Barcelona shot from a similar vantage point later in the day.
• The Amsterdam harbor just outside the building where we held a press briefing.  (Here’s my take, as well as the interior.)

Since folks seemed to enjoy my Paris panorama, here are a few more from the journey**:

• Barcelona skyline from Montjuïc.  I shot the harbor, including the cable car that took us to Montjuïc, from a similar vantage point.
• Barcelona skyline from Parc Güell.  (Bummer that it was so hazy.)  The Adobe office is in the beachfront high-rise that appears just to the right of the Sagrada Familia cathedral.  How people concentrate while working there, I have no idea…
• This version shows a couple of the famous Gaudí-designed ceramic works in the park, and this shot points the other direction, back into the park.  (Check out the little lizard king below the columns.)
• Interior of the city train station.
• Interior of one of the columns of the Sagrada Familia (also in Zoomify flavor, though there’s more noise than detail to explore).
• Sagrada facade–not a pano per se, but a shot that was required stiching these four images.
• Back to Amsterdam: a pair of images of the city’s famous canals.
• The history museum at Tarragona–just down the coast from Barcelona, and home of the Romans’ HQ in Iberia.
• Tarragona at sunset.

Figuring that if you’ve read this far, you must like panoramic flavor, so I’ll pass along a few more:

• Hans Nyberg has scanned & stitched photographs taken on the surface of the moon, assembling them into this excellent QuickTime VR panorama (complete with sound!).  More details on the project are here. [Via]
• Photographer Alexandre Duret-Lutz has turned his panos into a series of super cool Mini-planets. [Via]
• Jim Heid from Macworld passed along this lovely panorama he took from the top of L’Arc d’Triomphe.
• Photographer Scott Howard creates giant images, and through Zoomify you can see that they remain tack-sharp all the way in.  He writes, "For some examples of gigapano’s done with a standard (manual!) tripod, but with a nice Canon 100-400L lens have a look at these:
  • Sydney By Night – 740 Megapixels
  • Mega Machu Picchu – 1500 Megapixels
  • Chicago By Night – 1000 Megapixels"

*I also can’t offer up phrases like "Eindelijk sneeuw! De lichtmeester ‘at it again’!"  But I can enjoy the sound. 😉

**Note: We’re still fine tuning the Zoomify implementation in Photoshop.  The output here is generally nicer than what you can produce with the CS3 public beta, but we still have some work to do (e.g. the panos are a bit soft when they first load).  Also, I’m trying not to Zoomify things just for the sake of doing so, and instead I want to use the feature only when it adds value (and when it doesn’t let you see just how noisy some of my captures are!).

Oh, and one more thing: This is post #500 on the ol’ blog-blog-revolution.  I hope you enjoy the reading as much as I enjoy the writing.