I have put up a gallery of panoramas for Burning Man 2009. This year I went with the new Canon 5D Mark II, which has remarkable low-light shooting capabilities. As such, I generated a number of interesting new night panoramas in addition to the giant ones of the day.

In particular, you will want to check out the panorama of the crowd around the burn, as seen from the Esplanade, and the night scene around the Temple, and a twilight shot.

Today, fewer and fewer photos are printed. We usually see them on screen. And more and more commonly, we see them on a widescreen monitor. 16:9 screens are quite common as are 16:10. You can hardly find a 4:3 screen any more, though that is the aspect ratio of most P&S cameras. Most SLRs are 3:2, which still doesn't fit on the widescreen monitor.

The total eclipse of the sun is the most visually stunning natural phenomenon there is. It leaves the other natural wonders like the Grand Canyon far behind. Through an amazing set of circumstances I got to see my 4th on Enewetak, an isolated atoll in the Marshall Islands. Enewetak was the site of 43 nuclear explosions including Mike, the first H-bomb (which erased one of the islands in the chain.)

Back in March, I took my first trip to the middle east, to attend Yossi Vardi's "Kinnernet" unconference on the shores of lake Kinneret, also known as the Sea of Galilee. This is an invite-only conference and a great time, but being only 2 days long, it's hard to justify 2 days of flying just to go to it. So I also conducted a tour of sites in Israel and a bit of Jordan.

I'm really enjoying my Canon EOS 5D Mark II, especially its ability to shoot at 3200 ISO without much noise, allowing it to be used indoors, handheld without flash. But as fine as this (and other high end) cameras are, I still see a raft of features missing that I hope will appear in future cameras.

While I have over 30 galleries of panoramic photos up on the web, a while ago I decided to generate some pages of favourites as an introduction to the photography. I'm way behind on putting up galleries from recent trips to Israel, Jordan, Russia and various other places, but in the meantime you can enjoy these three galleries:

My Best Panoramas -- favourites from around the world

In my quest for the idea panorama head, I have recently written up some design notes and reviews. I found that the automatic head I tried, the beta version of the Gigapan turned out to be too slow for my tastes. I can shoot by hand much more quickly.

Lots of people are doing it -- using their digital camera as a quick way to copy documents, not just for taking home, but to carry around. Rather than carry around a large travel guidebook (where most of the weight is devoted to hotels and restaurants in other towns) we normally just photograph the relevant pages for the area we will be exploring. We also do it even with portable items like guides and travel maps since we don't really want the paper. We also find ourselves regularly photographing maps of cities, facilities and transit systems found on walls.

Since I do so many of my own, you won't find me blogging about other people's panoramas very much but this gigapixel shot of the crowd as Obama gives his inaugural speech is well worth exploring full screen. David Bergman's story of the photo is available.

I just got my new Canon 5D Mark II. (Let me know if you want to buy some of my old gear, see below...) This camera is creating a lot of attention because of several ground-breaking features. First, it's 22MP full-frame. Second, it shoots at up to 25,600 ISO -- 8 stops faster than the 100 ISO that was standard not so long ago, and is still the approximate speed of typical P&S today. It's grainy at that speed (though makes a perfectly good shot for web display) and it's really not very grainy at all at 3200 ISO.

This is an unfair review of the "Gigapan" motorized panoramic mount. It's unfair because the unit I received did not work properly, and I returned it. But I learned enough to know I did not want it so I did not ask for an exchange. The other thing that's unfair is that this unit is still listed as a "beta" model by the vendor.

I've been wanting something like the Gigapan for a long time. It's got computerized servos, and thus is able to shoot a panorama, in particular a multi-row panorama, automatically. You specify the corners of the panorama and it moves the camera through all the needed shots, clicking the shutter, in this case with a manual servo that mounts over the shutter release and physically presses it.

I shoot a lot of panos, as readers know, and so I seek a motorized mount for these reasons:

• I want to shoot panos faster. Press a button and have it do the work as quickly as possible
• I want to shoot them more reliably. With manual shooting, I may miss a shot or overshoot the angle, ruining a whole pano
• For multi-row, there's a lot of shooting and it can be tiresome.
• With the right shutter release, there can be lower vibration. You can also raise the mirror just once for the whole pano, with no need to see through the viewfinder.

Here's a new panorama gallery for Helsinki in Finland/Suomi with a few extra shots in a link off the end.

I now have a gallery up of the panoramas from Stockholm, Sweden. While this was not the best time of year to be photographing that far north (except for the availability of fall colour) I generated a lot of panoramas of various sorts. The main reason was I am trying some new panorama software, known as AutoPano Pro. This software is one of the licencees of the interesting SIFT algorithm, which is able to take a giant pile of pictures, and figure out which ones overlap and setting up the blend.

I have tripods with both 3 segments and 4 segments. A 4-segment tripod has 3 clamps per leg, which means 9 of them to open and close in extending and collapsing the tripod. That's a pain. Enough of one that you sometimes find yourself asking whether a shot is worth setting up the tripod. But even 3 segment tripods are only a bit better.

A friend (Larry P.) suggested that the time was here for serious (ie. DSLR) cameras to undertake a design revolution. The old SLR design, with a mirror that flips up and must sit between the last lens element and the sensor, creates a lot of problems in designing the lens and camera systems. Yes, being able to view directly through the lens with your eye is a very useful thing. But at what cost?

In my previous post, I noted that I had not done many night panoramas of Burning Man. I thought I should outline just why they are such a challenge.

Back from Burning Man and still dusty, here are five large panoramas to give you a sense of it.

Photographers constantly debate about jpeg. Should they shoot in RAW or JPEG, for example. RAW preserves everything, but is much harder and bulkier to work with, so you will see serious pro photographers, who you think would always vote for the "never throw away" logic of RAW, tell you they work mostly in JPEG. I'm one of them. I use raw only for shots with high dynamic range, like night photography, and often shoot RAW+JPEG to work with the JPEGs and pull the RAWs if you need it.

Last weekend I had a great trip to Wyoming, staying in Jackson for a bit and then into Yellowstone with a Cody side-trip.

As always, tons of photos and a new gallery of panoramic photos of the area. My last trip to Yellowstone featured poor weather and a very early (low quality) digital camera so I was pleased to photograph it again.

Check out my Gallery of Panoramas of Wyoming

I do enough photography that people ask me for advice on cameras. Some time ago I wrote an article about what lenses should I buy for a Canon DSLR which has turned out to be fairly popular. The thrust of that article, by the way, is to convince you that there is only minimal point in buying a DSLR that can changes lenses and getting only one lens for it, even if you plan to get another lens later (after your camera has depreciated plenty without using its real abilities.)