Experimenting with Panoramas

Click on the image for a slightly larger version. 

I thought I should get myself up to speed on stitching images together to form panoramas. Back in June (when married life was uncomplicated and I could concentrate more thoroughly on my course!) I took some photos in Porlock, Weir, Somerset, with the intention of trying this at some point. I hadn't pre-planned it, or read up on the technique, so it involved a bit of guesswork.

Looking at the images earlier today, I could see that I hadn't done too badly. I'd taken overlapping images, but I'd not done one crucial thing - I'd not ensured that the tripod head was perfectly level. However, by luck more than judgement, I'd take enough pictures to put together a montage. I'd also used manual focus and kept the camera on manual, so the shutter speed and aperture remained the same for each shot.

There were a few differences in brightness, which I rectified as much as I could in Photoshop (however, looking at the photo above, I can see that I didn't quite get it right on the left-hand side). In order to give me as much flexibility as possible, I'd used all of the images (fourteen it total) at full resolution. This has resulted in a humungous file size, and my poor old laptop was struggling with it a bit! Nevertheless, working at this resolution enabled me to blend the images more seamlessly than I would otherwise have been able to.

Needless to say, the photo above has been drastically reduced in size in order to post it here! Unfortunately I didn't take a full 360 degrees-worth of photos, so can't try the video technique with this set of images. I'm really hoping that I get a chance to go out and take some photos for that purpose soon.