New Tricks 6 — Stitching
As I go on my photographic journey, I’m noting down things I haven’t done before. These aren’t anything new to any half decent or experienced photographer, they are just new to me as I continue with my journey of discovery with (often wild eyed) wonder into the art of photography after many years of just point and click. This is number six of a series which may run for some time.
In New Tricks, the first of these articles, I had written about using the tripod for the first time, and how I had used it to take some panoramas using the panorama setting in my camera (Sony DSC-HX350).
And I thought that worked very well. However, to do the motion with the camera without getting error messages, it needs the tripod to prevent any vertical motion when doing the horizontal panning.
Which is fine when going local. But I was going to Spain for six days on holiday, and taking the tripod wasn’t really practical. But just before going there had been an e-mail out from the camera club saying that there was some — now unsupported — panorama stitching software available as a free download. Now, in my still fledgling photographic journey, free is a decent price, and so I downloaded it and installed it. And went on holiday.
Whilst in Granada we found ourselves at the top of hills (or more probably mountains in reality), with spectacular vistas out over the city and the surrounding countryside and mountains in the distance. Remembering I had this stitching software to try I, I proceeded to take a few series of photographs moving myself and the camera around a few degrees at a time to get the widest sweep I could.
Once back at home I loaded them into Kolor Autopano Giga. It surprised me in a couple of ways. First, it is really quick, there were between four and seven pictures in each of the panoramas I wanted to try and stitch together, and the longest it took to do any of them was two minutes. Secondly, it is simple to use. Drag the photos in in the order they go from left to right, click on process. Once done, crop it so it is a simple rectangle (the first image is ragged around the edge as you can’t keep the vertical spot on for each photograph), and click on render, and you have a full panoramic photograph in jpeg.
Cue one very pleased person (me). Again it may be worth me digging back through old photographs, as I know I’ve done that thing of taking panoramas in sets of separate photographs before, so need to find them and get them stitched.
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