Oooooh, new post – first in ages!

Having been very busy looking for work for 15 months and then very busy in a new job (yay) for the last 8 months, everything photo took a back seat.

Until this week’s holiday!! A well deserved (IMHO) break at the wonderful Auchenheglish Lodges on Loch Lomond provided an ideal opportunity to have a tinker with some panoramas.

All the “good” gear has gone the way of ebay so armed with the ever reliable pocket Panny, on the first clear morning, as the sun rose above the horizon, I took the long trek to the shore. All 15 feet of it.

There are loads of very thorough, technical, professional articles on how to take panoramas, I paid very little attention to those and just started snapping.

My approach was:

  • select the scenery scene mode on the camera
  • keep the horizon as level and as centred as possible
  • maintain a decent overlap between shots

The Panny has quite a wide lens for a compact camera (25mm equiv) but as this was going to be stitched I wanted to shoot as close to normal as I could so zoomed to 9mm (55mm equiv).

So… seven snaps later, in out of the cold and fired up Arcsoft Panorama Maker that was bundled with the camera. I’d usually go into Lightroom and pretend I know what I’m doing but I wanted to see how good/bad, easy/tough it is to get a decent result with no messing about.

The Arcsoft app is actually very easy to use, the only issue I had is that despite the files being named concurrently and selected in name order, it would always misorder them when done on auto and I’d have to go back and shuffle them.

Once the magic has happened, you’re presented the final result that shows all the original pics, stitched together, with a cropping box showing the maximum image size you can have without including blank space caused by alignment changes or distortions made during the stitching.

And the output…? Judge for yourself….

Attempt 1

The first attempt...

My thoughts…?

  • There’re a few joiny bits that are evident in the ripples but nothing a bit of blurring wouldn’t sort out.
  • It was still a bit dark.
  • I’d like a bit more height so the output wasn’t as narrow.

So on to attempt 2!!

Basically the same setup with the following changes:

  • Later in the day to give the suna chance to come up.
  • Clearer day (had to wait a couple due to very Scottish November weather!).
  • Shot in portrait orientation to capture more in the vertical.
  • Due to above, it was 10 pics to span the view, not 7.

So, here we are…

Take two...

  • Better aspect ratio.
  • Better framing.
  • Better colours.
  • Still a few joiny bits in the ripples.

But overall – very happy indeed – a bit more thought, planning and final tidying, results could be fantastic. For two attempts, literally 5-10 minutes each, I’m very impressed.

If you want a superlarge version, here’s one that’s 2560px wide – clicky.

Location:

Equipment used:

Panasonic FX35

Arcsoft Panorama Maker