Panoramic Photography
I figured out that you can do some pretty neat stuff with image
processing and a digital camera.
This image was created with five pictures, all shot with no
stabilization other than my hands and no tripod. No exposure lock was
used either, although the flash was turned off (even though the camera
wanted to use it on the far right shot). The scene pictured is
downtown Caen, France, as viewed from the top of one of the guard
tower-things in Le Chateau Ducal. It was 2110 or so when the pictures
were taken, so the sun was down pretty far. The camera was my Kodak DC280 and the stitching software used was
The Panorama Factory
2.0, from Smoky City Design. Image adjustements and croppings were
done using CompuPic. The
timestamps were cropped off of the final images after
stitching. Artifacting and blurring effects are clearly seen in the
the final images, but it still looks pretty good (see esp. the top of
the Cathedral).
Source images (click for the original, as used in the stitching)
Final result, scaled down to 2576x480 to minimize loading time
This is a java applet called PMVR. I'm sure there's
better ways of doing this (i.e. freeware), but it's a neat way of
looking at it.
The software gave me a 16 meg TIFF file with default settings. The
image above is a lot smaller than the original output; I compressed
this into a 990k
JPEG file that's 5318x969; 85% compression was used.
