A few months ago, I helped my friend Erik Walker get his company’s portfolio site up and running: Binzen&Walker Photography. Binzen&Walker create beautiful panoramic photographs that, in contrast to mechanized techniques (e.g. GigaPan) are hand-shot and hand-stitched for artistic effect.

It’s a basic and relatively clean WordPress site, based on an existing theme. Aside from a bunch of CSS changes, my contribution was mashing up a couple WordPress plugins to create a nice interface for exploring examples of their panoramic photographs. Showcasing such huge images online is difficult because of very limited resolution of computer displays. In real life, a print of one of Binzen&Walker’s prints could easily cover twelve feet of a gallery wall. Online, a zooming and panning interface was needed.

To get this working, I did a simple combination of two existing plugins: Flexible Lightbox and YD-Zoomify. I’m calling it Flexible Zoomify. You can see a screenshot below or click on the images in this portfolio gallery to try it out.

Here’s a little sketch I made using Processing. It’s based on a standard flocking program that Benjamin and Mary F. were playing around with; I added a second flock, some randomness in their coloring, and the concept of “weight.” Heavier boids move slower, turn slower, beat their wings slower and are more pudgy in shape. I also gave them all trails, using a simple transparent rectangle placed between frames (a very computationally cheap way to do this.)

Below is a screenshot of the Processing sketch. Click to load the applet in your browser window and see it in motion. That link also has the source code for the sketch.

Note: Apologies for those who got spam in their RSS readers from this entry. After some WordPress upgrades and removal of some suspicious files and users, I’m hoping that I have the spam kicked.