Panoramas

I finished my Ireland Gallery today, but I left off the panoramas I had created because they don’t shrink down to thumbnails very well. The new camera has a Stitch Assist mode that lets me take panoramas consisting of several pictures to give one wide picture. The assist mode just shows you the last picture so that you can overlap the current picture on it. Once you get home, you use Canon PhotoStitch to open all the pictures at once and have the software stitch them together.

It doesn’t work perfectly. If you don’t pan in a straight line, the horizon will be crooked. Worse, you get voids along the top and bottom of the picture and wind up cropping out a lot of the top and bottom of the picture as the software distorts pictures to make everything line up. Plus if one picture is a little too high and one is a little too low, you have a gap along the top or bottom. So you crop all of that out and end up with a wide picture.

The wide picture is hard to do anything with too. You can’t really print it and to see the full resolution, you have to scroll sideways on your computer screen. Still, I like the results in some cases. I took maybe ten or so panorama shots in Ireland and here are the best ones.

This was taken from the top of the Guinness Brewery Storehouse. They have a glassed in tasting area (like a bar) that gives a nearly 360-degree view of Dublin. There is some distortion of the horizon, which at first I thought might be the curvature of the earth, but I got better at this later.

The next panorama was taken in front of Fota House around sunset.

One thing I realized quickly was that because the panorama consists of several individual picture, you could potentially have the same person appear several times in the panorama. I didn’t do that here at the Cliffs of Moher, but I’m saving that idea.

This one was taken at Connor Pass on the Dingle Peninsula looking back towards Tralee and this flat valley which had lakes and traces of ruins at the bottom. The Slieve Mish mountain range is on the left and right, with the right being the road we came up. You can see an artifact of the stitching about two-thirds of the way over along the bottom of this picture, but I didn’t want to crop out that much of the bottom of the picture. Also, with the panoaramas you can get a better view of cloud formations including this one that is creeping over the pass.

This is one that Susan took from the car near Slea Head on Dingle Peninsula. We were stuck in traffic and had this great view of the ocean and a string of rocky islands. However, by the end, the viewfinder ran into the car mirror and the windshield post.

Here is another Dingle picture of a rocky point on the shoreline.

This was such a nice area, I decided to do a 360-degree panorama. While most of the shots above are 3 or 4 pictures, this one is made from 13 individual pictures. The rocky point above is just part of this picture. When you do a 360, you catch all the things you would normally avoid, like in this case, a bus and some people.

Because each panorama consists of several 7-megapixel images, the file size gets pretty large. Therefore the images these thumbs link to are 25% of the original size. The panoramas lend themselves pretty well to blog banner images, so a few have showed up there already.