I came up with the ONE-SECOND PANO while were all sitting on Ninagiak Island after three hours of photographing puffins in the wild. We were waiting for the skiff to come pick us up, and I snapped the ONE-SECOND PANO with Jimmy’s fire-breathing dragon. You’ll notice that I have categorized this entry as being both in “Photo” and “Humor” — I suppose it’s a photo-nerd humor, but that’s what I am, so here it is.

Al Vinjamur was somehow fundamentally insulted by even the idea of a ONE-SECOND PANO. Hand held? Moving camera? One second? He was disgusted. This made it even more funny to all of us. On the other side of the fence was Jim Abernethy, who couldn’t wait to do his own. We make quite a team.

Jimmy was nice enough to lend me his brand-new Canon 1D Mk III digital SLR for the little project. I started out by setting the camera to burst mode (10 frames per second) at shutter speed of 1/8000 second. Then, I wound up my body, prepared myself, and unleashed the fire-breathing dragon (Jim’s pet name for his camera) as I rotated quickly. The sound of a 10 fps camera with a real, mechanical shutter is truly something to behold. I rotated just under 180 degrees in 1 second, recording 11 frames in sequence:

11 shots in 1.1 seconds

Here’s the finished panorama:

[see zoomified version] [download 1920 pixel version]

Here is a 100% crop (taken from the area in the red square, above):

600×400 pixel crop from one of the frames

As you can see, it’s pretty sharp for an image taken from a quickly-rotating camera.

Finally, here is a video of me shooting a ONE-SECOND PANO:

If you’re reading this and have a fast camera, go out and take a ONE-SECOND PANO and post a link here. I’d love to see more. :)