Don Bain's 360° Panoramas

This site features more than 9000 360-degree interactive panoramas. These amazing photographs show you exactly what it is like to be in a particular place - you can look in any direction, all the way around, even up and down. It's the next best thing to being there!

To try one out - CLICK HERE

Requires Flash

Choose a region by clicking on the map... or select from the alphabetical list below.

California -- Northern

California -- Central

California -- Southern/Eastern

Northwest Territories

Oregon

Sonora

South Dakota

South Pacific Islands

Other ways to access the panoramas:
A clickable map showing localities.
A chronological list, day by day.

Contact Don Bain: donbain@360Panos.com

Interested in seeing more 360° panoramas? Visit The World Wide Panorama website - more than 5000 VR panoramas created by over a thousand photographers from around the world. Want to participate? It is a quarterly event, and anyone can enter!

The 360° Panoramas Blog (formerly The Virtual Guidebooks Blog) is published now and then, with news and views about the website "Don Bain's 360° Panoramas".

The most important blogs in the last year are those about my epic trip through Canada to Alaska in Fall 2010.

Don's Trip to the Far North - Part One - December 17, 2010

Don's Trip to the Far North - Part Two - December 17, 2010

Don's Trip to the Far North - Part Three - December 17, 2010

Don's Trip to the Far North - Part Four - December 17, 2010

For older news and commentary see the Blog Archive

2011 Blogs Missing - Sorry!

(October 12, 2011)

I have been so continuously busy throughout the year 2011 (basically since finishing the Alaska blogs) that I have not had time to write up several very important new topics. Sorry!

• I made a three week trip to the Big Island of Hawaii in March 2011, resulting in a complete new set of 245 panoramas documenting all parts of that fantastic island. I plan to write a full blog about this trip, with illustrations and links.

• In May 2011 I made a major change to the way the Virtual Guidebooks site works. Previously all files were sent from a single main server (DreamHost) in Southern California. But now I have moved the graphics files (thumbnails and panorama movies) to the Rackspace Cloud. They will be sent to end users "from the cloud", specifically from various Akamai servers around the world, the choice of which ones being based on analysis of distance and traffic.

I can see that pages load much faster, and the speed increase should be more obvious the further from California the viewer is located. Also, increasing traffic will not slow the system down and huge spikes of traffic will not crash it. This is real enterprise technology, and it costs me extra, the amount depending on traffic. This year will be my test period. If the cost gets too high, I may have to go back to the old system.

• In late May 2011 I traveled to Portugal for the International Panoramic Photography Festival. This included staging two exhibits of panoramic prints, one of them, entitled Panorama Borealis, featuring photography from my trip to Alaska in 2010. It was a real thrill seeing an entire gallery devoted exclusively to my pictures, a total of 77 of them, some as large as 9 feet wide. I aso enjoyed giving an introductory talk about my trip and the exhibit.

I was the curator for another significant photography exhibit, The Masters of Contemporary Panoramic Photography, staged in the medieval church at Palmela Castle.

The Palmela conference, and especially the two exhibitions for which I was responsible, deserve a full blog of their own, which I am working on.

• When California passed a new state budget effective July 1, it required Amazon and other on-line retailers with a "presence" in California to pay sales tax. Amazon is based in Washington state, and they pay taxes on sales they make to customers located there. But now sales made to California residents will similarly be subject to California sales tax.

Unfortunately, instead of simply paying the taxes, Amazon chose to cut off all affiliates resident in California, thereby eliminating the "presence" that triggers the change. So although I could continue to run ads for Amazon, and visitors to my site could purchase the books and maps I recommend here, I was not paid any commission on those sales. But fortunately by October Amazon had cut a deal with the State of California, and my account was reinstated. But the issue is only postponed, not resolved, and this will probably come up again next year.

• In mid-September 2011, after much thought, I undertook a top to bottom revision of my website, starting with the name. The original name "Virtual Guidebooks" made sense early on, when I planned to develop detailed travel guides illustrated with VR panoramas. This would have required either a staff of researchers and writers, or a partnership with an existing travel guide publisher. Neither of those worked out, but I kept on shooting and producing the panoramas anyway. So the new name - Don Bain's 360° Panoramas - is a better fit.

• Along with the name change I have revamped the internal structure to make the urls shorter and more logical. These days most people click links to navigate, and almost never type a url, but sometimes, for example in a printed article, the url is necessary.

For example, the old url for my panoramas of San Francisco was:: virtualguidebooks.com/CentralCalif/SanFrancisco/SanFrancisco.php
and the new one is simply:: 360panos.com/CentralCalif/SanFrancisco
Even simpler, a state, such as Hawaii, is now just:: 360panos.com/Hawaii
Similarly, the Blog is now:: 360panos.com/Blog
and the Books section is:: 360panos.com/Books

The new version of the website, with the new name "Don Bain's 360° Panoramas, went on-line about October 1, but will not be complete until the end of the month.

Contact Don Bain: donbain@360Panos.com