I picked up this job the other week. Robertson Homes, one of the largest new homes developers in Scotland have decided to revamp the VT marketing of their showhomes. I was contacted by their web developers and asked to visit their Kilmarnock development to  do a 12 image shoot of the interior.
  
This is the master bedroom
The full virtual tour is on the Robertson Homes website here

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be invited back to crew on Duchess, a Hanse 41 yacht, for the annual Around Bute race. We competed last year in a blustery and very exciting race and won in a record time - our top speed was close to 10.5 knots.
 

This year the sun shone relentlessy and we pootled along at a steady 4 knots in a light breeze. Eventually, about half way round the island and with some of the smaller yachts barely away from the start line the race was finished early. We had won again. Thanks to Iain & Maureen for the invitation aboard and G & T’s and Scotch pies!

Recently a school friend of my daughter succumbed to an inoperable brain tumour. Calum was a popular local boy who leaves a twin sister.
Calum’s parents are setting up a charitable trust in his memory. Their aim is to raise enough money to purchase a cabin on our island that can be used as a holiday retreat by families dealing with children who have cancer. As the webdesigner of the holiday cabin supplier they approached me to run up a quick site to publicise the cause.
Visit it here - http://www.calumscabin.co.uk/  – and if you wish you can donate via the links to PayPal on the site.

Finally another blog entry.
Note to self: make more time for this!!

I’ve recently completed an 11 image VT of a local mansion converted to holiday apartments.

It’s in a wonderful position overlooking the Clyde.

I decided to increase the viewing window size for greater impact. Think it works though browsers with small monitors/800×600 res may find it a bit crowded. (Who uses 800×600 anymore – higher resolution is much more satisfying)

View it here : http://www.360iview.co.uk/media/ardenapartments/index.htm

I recently (well 6 weeks ago or so) completed a job for a Glasgow vehicle hire company called Freedom Campervans. It was a bit of a lucky commission as I’d fired off an e-mail to them after finding their website during an internet trawl for holiday accommodation – it counts doesn’t it? Coincidentally, their MD Robert, had been looking for someone to provide photos and virtual tours for his new website and he called me back. 

So we spent a few hours in a leafy lane taking exterior shots (above) plus some interior stills and the 360’s – one for each van. Their redesigned website is now live here .
Freedom’s MD Robert e-mailed me this the other day:
“Andy, your photography and 360 degree photo tours have added a very professional finish to our website and I just wanted to let you know that within days of going live on the site I have been receiving some very positive comments from customers about the new feature. Thanks for coming over and doing the job for us at such short notice, really appreciate it!”
A nice little job for nice people.
PS The other van exterior shots on the website are photos taken by some of their customers.

I wouldn’t normally bring up the weather here, but we’ve suddenly been hit by some vicious and slightly weird stuff. Wild, wet and windy is what we’ve come to expect in the winter on the west coast, but thunder and lightning in November is a bit strange and we have hail – OK I know I said snow – but it looks like snow and is white and cold.

Yeh, yeh, and it also looks like I’ve emptied a couple of bags of sugar outside my studio door – it is in fact a small hail drift. Luckily my door opens in the way – I expect I’ll be digging my way out tomorrow.

So why all the fuss? Well, we don’t get much in the way of white stuff around here in the winter, due to the Gulf Stream  warming effect, so a little bit of icy precipitation causes a shimmer of excitement.  And I’m a grown up – imagine how the kids react.

Last Saturday we went to a beach party at the seaside cottage featured earlier. I had intended to do a another night time panorama of the scene but including some of the huge arsenal of fireworks our friend Michael had brought. So I’m setting up my tripod and realised I’d left a crucial part of my Panosaurus in the studio. Too late to go and get it so just fired off some tripod shots of the show anyway.
 

Surprisingly, the housing market on the island is burgeoning for this time of year – in the run up to Christmas people usually have other things on their minds.
I produced this Virtual Tour today of a pleasant little Victorian House in Rothesay.
Of course this sort of work could be said to be a bit run-of-the-mill, but it helps pay the bills and it’s actually very interesting in a sort of “through the keyhole” way.

Here’s a full screen QT panorama taken on a surprisingly balmy evening in late October. The house belongs to some good friends of mine.

It looks really isolated, but Rothesay, the main town on the island, is only 4.5 miles away. A great spot to live.
Run the full screen Quicktime Movie (4.00Mb)

How’s this for a panoramic camera!

And it produces images like this:

Available early 2007 from Seitz in Switzerland – priced from 27,000 Euros (that’s £18,000) body only – I’ll take 2!