My first panorama shot.

[elfs]

Park Butte Panorama

I'll write more about this tomorrow, but I couldn't wait to get this out and show it to you. This is my first panorama shot; it's from the High Heather Meadow southwest of Mt. Baker, which is about a half-mile up from the trail fork where Railroad Grade Trail and Park Butte Trail separate, three and a half miles from Schweiber's meadow and above Cathedral View Camp. There's a snowpack just below where the trail on which you can see the girls drops off. It took us four hours to walk up and get this shot.

I'm not sure why there's an exposure smear right where the girls are; a friend of mine suspects that my camera auto-adjusted for the snowglare coming off the mountain, and he's probably right.

This photo was taken with a hand-held Lumix TZ1 and stitched together using the open-source tools Hugin, Autopano, and Enblend.

A (much!) larger version (4555px x 768px, 945KB) can be found here.

Comments

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I'll never improve my own pano-fu if I don't practice!

[whipartist.livejournal.com]

It's true.

First lesson from someone who has done a lot of this: start by putting the camera in manual mode. Find an exposure and focus point that seems like a good compromise for the whole shot, and then use that for everything.

With an unevenly-exposed pano, there's a Photoshop technique that you can use to balance out the exposures pretty well, but it's fairly sophisticated. It involves layers, color channels, and a lot of hand-adjustment of levels. I'd be happy to explain it in greater detail if you want, but I doubt you'd be able to do the same thing with open source tools. (While I'm wildly in favor of open source for most things, when it comes to truly sophisticated image processing I don't think anything matches Photoshop's capabilities.)

If you really want to perfect this particular pano and you can't figure out how to correct for the exposure problems, I'd be happy to give it a shot. This shot requiredd a nightmarish level of corrections, and I'm pretty happy with the smoothness of the final image. Otherwise, I'll gladly give you tips from someone who has done dozens of very large panoramas.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Holy cow, that's a nice shot!

[whipartist.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

There are lots of mediocre ones in that set that I produced while I was learning how to do this stuff.