Sunday, March 15, 2015

Debacle in Shetland: Accidental and Intentional Panoramas


In early 2012, when Google Street View was still fairly new, I found myself stuck in an office in the Middle East with three months and nothing to do. Since I was already planning on going to Aberdeen, one thing I did to pass the time was to use Google Street View to scout places to visit in Orkney and Shetland. Both of these have obviously gotten a lot of attention on this blog. One place I was eager to visit was Sumburgh Head, the southernmost point in Shetland. I'd taken a screenshot (see above), and one thing I wanted to do was make my own panorama looking north from Sumburgh Head.

Once I got the photos uploaded to Facebook on the 4th of April 2013, I promptly forgot about actually making the panorama. Then, on the morning of the 15th of March 2015, nearly two years later, I was looking back through that Facebook album for this photo, and stumbled upon this:


My intentional photography aimed at producing a panorama became an accidental panorama on Facebook. I've gotten a lot better at using PowerPoint to "Photoshop" images over the last couple of years, so I spent about ten minutes, and voila, the image posted below was the result.


It looks like there's a gap between the left-most image and its neighbor. I guess that's just the risk you run. Under the circumstances, I'm not sure I'll be back to remedy the situation any time soon. It sort of makes me wonder when Shetland is green, because it seemed like Orkney was always Green whenever I was there, but there's obviously a significant difference between Shetland's foliage when the folks from Google visited in June of 2009, and when I visited nearly four years later.

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