onfocus

My obsession with panoramics continues. A friend recommended Realviz Stitcher to help put them together, and I've been having fun trying it out. Today I walked up to the top of Chip Ross park and carefully took a series of photos using my camera's panoramic mode. (This mode freezes the initial exposure settings so all of the shots in the "panoramic" series have the same basic look. Panoramic mode on my camera also puts up some extra guidelines on the display to help line-up the shots.) Here's the end result after putting together the shots with Stitcher:

• The Big Pan (215 kb)
• Corvallis Detail (206 kb)

(If you're familiar with Corvallis you can see a lot of the town in that second picture. From left to right: downtown, the courthouse, OSU campus, 29th ST, and the Timber Hill area. If you're not familiar with the landmarks, it's not too exciting.)

Realviz Stitcher is a bit cumbersome to use, but if you lined up the shots carefully and then fiddle with the program properties quite a bit, it does a great job of blending the photos together. These two pictures have some points of distortion, but I think it's better than I would have been able to do in Photoshop "by hand". I'm sure there are ways I can optimize the photos as I take them to minimize the distortion—a tripod would help.