An Experiment With a W-I-D-E View

I have no idea where the time goes. Busy, busy, busy - right? Probably you too, huh? It's been a long time since I last created a new post. Sigh!! Oh well, here's one that I've had partially finished for a long time.

On several occasions, I've looked at the scenery that surrounds me, and wished that I could capture "the whole thing." I remember reading, a long time ago in my past, about cylindrical cameras consisting of a sheet of film positioned inside a cylinder, and a slot in the side of the cylinder to let the light in. The cylinder was held in a vertical position, and rotated, which would allow for a 360 degree picture to be taken. But, much more recently, I've read about software that will take a collection of individual digital photos and stitch them together into a single 'huge' picture. So, on a couple of occasions, I've stood in a fixed place, and taken a collection of individual photos, moving carefully from my left to my right, being careful to make sure that each new photo overlaped some of the scenery from the previous. I also tried to keep the distant horizon vertically poistioned at a uniform place within my view finder.

So, I wanted to show you an experiment that turned out pretty good. To put this together, I used the Autostitch program, which I downloaded from www.autostitch.net. (If you go to this address, note that you will be redirected to another address.) Click on Download the FREE demo version (Windows) now!.

On this particular evening, we experienced a very lovely sunset -- one of those that seems to wrap all around you. I stopped by the side of the road on the way home, and jumped out of my car with my camera. I started oohing and aahing at what was developing, and started taking pictures. After noticing that the 'show' was wrapping itself all around me, I decided to see if I could capture enough shots to put together the panorama.

The following 8 photos are a progression from left to right. Each of the original photos is 3264 pixels wide by 2448 pixels high. When I upload those photos to this blog, I have to reduce them in size to 800 wide by 600 high. However, when I configured Autostitch to process these photos, I told Autostitch that I wanted the 'output' file to be 2400 pixels high. I wanted to be able to pan the panoramic picture left and right, and see the entire 360 degrees that I saw when I was standing there taking these photos. I didn't want to loose any resolution. After running these 8 photos through Autostitch, the output file ended up being 14,026 pixels wide by 2,400 pixels high.

Note that each of these has been uploaded as 800 by 600. But, because the resulting panoramic picture is so large, I uploaded the final picture as 1600 by 274.

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I wish that I could upload the entire output picture in all its splendor. But, I can't. Anyway, make sure to click on the picture below to see it in a larger form.

All in all, I am very pleased with the results. I don't know if I will do this very often, but it is a very good tool to have under your belt when the scenery demands it.