"WHAT IS A QTVR PANORAMA?" The QTVR panorama is a special type of still image format which enables you to look at a scene in 360 degrees, as if you were standing in the middle of it.

Viewing is easy - click on the link, the file downloads onto your computer (this can take a couple of minutes or so) the QTVR viewer is launched automatically and the picture file opens. To shift the direction of view, click in the picture, hold and drag. Further keys enable you zoom in or out

QTVR stands for Quick Time Virtual Reality, a technology developed by Apple which enables the delivery, via the Internet and other electronic media, of still and moving images, sound, music and other multimedia content.

1170: Centre of Piccadilly Gardens Jul99

In order to view QTVR panoramas, and other Quick Time content, you must have the Quick Time plug-in installed in your system. It can be downloaded by going to www.apple.com/quicktime/qtvr/. There are versions available for all the major operating systems. To download, just follow the instructions, it's quite straightforward. If you have any questions, e-mail aidan@anamaria.u-net.com

1238: Market St corner of Piccadilly July99

MAKING A QTVR PANORAMA is fairly easy. The basis of a QTVR panorama is a 360 degree image. This can be captured either by using a panoramic camera or by taking a series of shots using a film or digital camera. The end result is long picture which joins back on itself. When the two ends are stitched together, it's like looking at the inside of a cylinder.

St Peters Square & Metrolink 1998

I used my Russian-built Horizont panoramic camera to make the 360 degree panorama above.The lens swivels through about 120 degrees and projects an image through a vertical slit onto 35mm film, producing a negative of 56mm wide and 24mm high. Each photograph covers one third of a 360 degree view. I take four overlapping images for each panorama. I scan the negatives on my Nikon Coolscan 35mm film scanner and join them up in Photoshop. Then I clean up and enhance the image, save it, and open it in Photovista, which outputs the QTVR panorama.

P04: Piccadilly Station & Virgin Trains loco

You can also use a film or digital camera to make a 360 panorama, but it's a little more difficult, as the camera must be held steady and level, ideally rotating around the nodal point. The nodal point is the point midway between the lens and the film. A tripod with a special head is the best way of positioning the camera, but it's also possible to take the photos hand held.

Turning the camera through a complete rotation, you take a succession of photos - 12 or 18 are typical. After scanning the film, or downloading the images if you're using a digital camera, they are opened in PhotoVista, and it completes the rest of the job, outputting a stitched panorama in JPEG format and the QTVR panorama in Quick Time file format.

180 degree panorama of Castlefield

I also do partial panoramas, such as this one of Castlefield in Manchester. I held the camera (Agfa E-Photo) vertical and turned the swivel lens through about 180 degrees, taking a succession of photos. I don't make partial panoramas into QTVR panoramas as you can't spin them through 360 degrees.

PhotoVista, produced by Live Picture, is an inexpensive, but highly sophisticated piece of software which has the "intelligence" to stitch photo sequences into continuous panoramas. Previously I did the stitching in Photoshop by hand, and it took me a couple of hours. PhotoVista can do the same job in a few minutes. The image may still need some retouching in Photoshop, but assuming your original images are all absolutely vertical and don't stray too far from the nodal point, the join should be seamless. By the way, Photoshop, produced by Adobe, is still the best image-editing software available.

If you have any more questions about QTVR panoramas, please e-mail aidan@anamaria.u-net.com