Composite panoramic pictures made up of several individual images can be very useful to show cloud formations. I’ve previously used PTGui to generate panoramas, but now I found Autostitch, which not only works automatically (how do they do that 8O) , but is also free for non-commercial use
Here’s a quick and dirty example I created with Autostitch, unfortunately the clouds are very uninteresting.
I did exactly that at the GC back in the film era, and all it did was flatten out the whole landscape, the pictures had no impression of size or depth. At least with digital you can see what’s going on and change your strategy.
For a good panorama (which the linked one isn’t) don’t use a wide angle, use the camera in portrait orientation (increase the height vs. width of the end result), take lots of pics to make up the whole scene. The linked one was a quickie using wide angle, minimum overlap, only 7 or 8 pics for 360 degrees, and you can see the falloff in brightness at the edge of the frames when you put then together.
Fun doing the Panoramic stuff I use Photoshop PS2 it also has the autostitch But beware some of the photos can get large
I’ve seen a few get on the order of 639mb in size!! #-o#-o
One of the nice things about autostitch (aside from being free) is that you can just set the desired size of the panorama and not have to mess with the raw images.
Niko, thanks for the great tip.
I always used Photovista Panorama, but not all my pano’s went well with that.
Since I use Autostitch, even the worst photographed pano’s are looking great
See the example of the lake with windmill. Photographed out of the hand, no tripod:
[color=blue][i]Personally I use Adobe Photoshop to do my Panoramas, but it is expensive. Photoshop Elements is a not as feature packed as Photoshop CS2, but does wonders with pictures for about $80.
I took multiple shots of Casper, WY from our events center last spring, and it turned out good…but had a problem, make sure your shutter speed is the same otherwise they’ll take allot of enhancing
Go [b][i][u]here[/u] for a sample of what I have done using Photoshop.