I rue the day I started taking panoramic photos. It seems now that I just can't stop.
One of my favourite things to do, photography-wise, is create panoramas. It started a few years ago when vacation pics I took in Nova Scotia just didn't seem to capture the size and scope of some of the places I visited. But when I stitched a few consecutive pictures together, the effect was much improved.
On the flipside, this tactic has really upped the number of film rolls I run off at any given time. Each panorama is usually constructed from anywhere between three and ten single photos, depending on the span of the subject. From there it's a seemingly endless process of colour matching and rubber-stamp work in Photoshop.
These panoramas were taken on two of the better days from my vacation. At top is the amazing view from the Bear's Hump (click here for a closer look), constructed from a series of eight separate photos. This image best shows Waterton Lakes National Park's tight transition between prairie and mountains, as well as the townsite and the park's namesake string of lakes. Above is the five-photograph, west-facing view of Crypt Valley (click here for a closer look), and below is an east-facing view along Lower Waterton Lake with some cool directional clouds (made from six photos, click here for a closer look).
6 comments:
Beautiful work, man. Can you send me some tips on how to do this? I tend to f**k it up. Check this for example:
My workspace
I'm just sloppy.
damn jeope!
very nice. did you use a tripod to take the shots? i have never taken the time to do that, but i have often thought how (especially in scenic shots) that the little 35mm rectangle just cannot capture the grandure.
I'll have to try it some time. And someday I'd like to graduate to a large format camera - when i win the lotto i guess.
Al, they get harder the closer the subject matter is. That's why it really lends itself to scenery and other big stuff. It's also harder to make these seamless pics of anything man-made, because any mistakes and coverups are easier to spot. With nature I can just rubber-stamp clouds, trees, etc. overtop of the image splits.
Lew, no tripod. Which is why so much Photoshop work is required to scale or rotate each image slightly to make it fit together. A tripod would definitely help, tho. I just take a pic, remember what was roughly at the edge of the pic, pivot to that spot and repeat. And the more overlap the better, otherwise I get all sorts of distortion and stuff not lining up properly.
that blows me away. are you sure you're not just using the "panoramic" setting on your camera? :-)
Thanks, dude!
Very cool!
I've tried doing it before and it worked pretty well, but the pictures I started out with weren't nearly as cool as those!!!
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