Playing with my camera: Camping Day 2: Silver Falls.

[elfs]

Silver Falls

This is a very small panorama I shot of one of our two destinations camping today, Silver Falls. It's stitched together from four images.

One of the things I've discovered about "panoramas" is that, with few exceptions, what I really use them for is rectilinear stitching: to get that much impression into an image, I'd either have to be standing much further away from my subject, or I can take several dozen photos around the subject and then stitch them together with Hugin. It takes a little discipline to move the camera such that the lens is what's moving, not the camera and definitely not your head, but once you figure that out, getting a rich image set to seam and stitch is absolutely simple. And it preserves a lot of the resolution than I wanted.

Comments

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

Panorama stitching software is the poor man's wide-angle lens.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

it's actually better than that, in that you preserve natural perspective. Fisheye lenses are called that precisely because they distort things. This... doesn't. To get this with a single camera, you'd have to have both a huge lens, and a huge (or very very hi-res) surface (film or ccd) onto which to project.... way more expensive than even a decent fisheye. If practical atall. This... is why the space age rocks.

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

I did mean traditional rectilinear wide-angle lenses, not fisheye. Of course, stitching can go wider than even the widest angle lenses, as it's capable of 360 degree FOV while they only go up to about 100 degrees.