Digital Panoramas

Creating panoramic images is fun; especially when you can use a digital camera. The time-consuming and painstaking process of developing, scanning, color matching and only then stitching the images together. With digital images, you can take the photographs, stitch them together, color correct and then crop and display the images.

Always remember to keep the camera perpendicular to the vertical and the horizon straight across the middle of the camera. This avoids distortion that is non-correctable.

My favorite software when it comes to making panoramas is Smoky City Design’s ‘The Panorama Factory‘. It has a comprehensive list of cameras and the lenses’ focal lengths. This enables the software to compensate for this pre-determined barrel or pincushion distortion based on the zoom amount. The wizard-generated images are quite good with a well-shot panorama but a little manual tweaking can go a long way in improving a badly shot one.

Note: This tiny post was written in 2004, when BPT was on the “Blogger” platform. At the time, I was taking photographs for clients on a Sony Mavica digital camera (it was the only digital camera that I had access to), and converting them into panoramas. These files were saved to a floppy disk, so we had to carry a box of them around with us. Today, I’m surprised by the quality of some of these images.