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Category: Destinations
Wall Drug is the most widely advertised retail and restaurant destination in all of South Dakota, with billboards extending along I-90 for hundreds of miles. It is essentially a shopping mall with all stores under a single owner, in a very small town near Badlands National Park. Offerings include a drug store, gift shops, retailers, restaurants, an ice cream parlor, and various tourist attractions. The store is said to draw 2 million visitors annually and take in over $10 million in sales.
Jeff Schreier
17/12/2015Nice work, Lee!
Lee Hawkins
17/12/2015Jeff Schreier: Thanks!
Isthmus Media Group
25/01/2016Cool shot and love the colors! I was wondering if you shoot a standard 4-image pano, and then the nadir, or how you clean out the space beneath the tripod without having any distortion? Thanks!
Lee Hawkins
25/01/2016Isthmus Media Group: I use any assortment of things in my processing, depending on circumstance, and yes, I do use shots in 4 directions. Each pano in this particular tour is 4 shots around using 3-shot HDR. After processing my individual files in Adobe Lightroom, I stitch with PTGUI, which does a magnificent job of removing all lens distortion, and I do my HDR blends in PTGUI as well. Often I use some special color mixes in each layer in order to prevent too many weird color casts, as well as to bring out colors that I want to really push, like in the sky. For nadirs, it depends on the floor, but I sometimes use a nadir shot, and other times I just use a Photoshop plugin that allows me to edit the top and bottom cube faces and reintegrate them back into the equirectangular file. When I work on the cube faces, I can clone out the tripod legs and the hole on the bottom without it being too obvious. I have a Lightroom preset that I created that allows me to slap my logo on the bottom on export.
Isthmus Media Group
25/01/2016Hi Lee,
Thanks much for your insight and feedback! I use PTGUI and AutoPano Giga, but your info is helpful. I have plugins for PTGUI to import/export the square nadir and sky panels, but it's a PITA to do for large real estate tours that might have 20 panoramas. Would you mind sharing the name of your photoshop plugin? I was able to find one, but it's PC only.
Thanks again for the feedback!
Lee Hawkins
25/01/2016Isthmus Media Group: I use Flexify2 from Flaming Pear Software. I don't think I would even bother with nadirs unless it's a portfolio piece or for a well-paying customer. I'm really surprised you get all the distortion you do at the bottom using PTGUI...I've never seen that happen so frequently as I did looking at one of your recent tours. It's still time-consuming to do even with Flexify, and I doubt most RE agents are paying rates high enough for me to even bother to put my gear in the car, let alone deal with nadirs. Most RE agents don't want to pay more than $150 for photos unless it's a 7-figure property.