February 10, 2006

Panorama Pictures

Panoramas, shooting pictures in ‘more dimensions’.

When I bought my first digital camera, a Canon G2, I learned that making Panorama pictures is a fun thing to do. Changing the normal perspective someone has when looking at pictures usually attracts attention, and the process of assembling a panorama brings back a bit of “the working in the darkroom feeling” that I had when still shooting analog pictures. Ok, you don’t small the chemicals, but still, the additional creative process is simply a nice thing to do.

There are various types of panoramic pictures, the most simple one is a picture assembled from two or more pictures to create a wider view of a scene. You can do this easily with a digital camera, and some digital cameras brands supply the software to stitch the pictures together. There are even cameras that can do this stitching for you in the camera itself nowadays, like the Kodak EasyShare V570. But, it is even possible to create panoramic pictures with your cellphone camera.

An advantage of stitching pictures together is that the resolution of your picture increases, so even with your 3 megapixel camera, you can create pictures, if you take enough, that have a higher resolution then the most expensive digital cameras, like the Hasselblad 39 megapixel monster. Max Lyons, author of the panorama stitching program PTAssembler has created a gigapixel picture by combining 196 digital camera pictures!

So, besides creating a wider view, panorama pictures can also be used to increase the resolution of your pictures….

There are a few basic types of panoramic pictures, the Mosaic Panorama, where you create a single, new, picture by stitching more pictures together, either to create a wider view, or a higher resolution picture. High resolution pictures can be displayed interactivly on your website by a program like Zoomify, a freeware flash application.

Cylinder Panoramas are panoramas that cover a 360 degree circle around the viewer. You need to take enough pictures to cover the 360 degree circle, if you have a wide angle lens on your camera, you need less then when you use a standard lens. There are various options to display a cylinder panorama on your website, where people can change the angle of view by using there mouse or keyboard, and plenty of them are freeware. Java applets, such as PTViewer, or the Immervision Java viewer, but also Quicktime from Apple.

Cubic Panoramas or Spherical Panoramas are panoramas that cover a full 360 degree view around the viewer, in all directions. Allthough you could make a 360 degree panorama with a digital camera and a standard lens, it requires much less pictures if you use a (very) wide angle lens, or even a fish-eye lens.

Later more on Cameras and Software, for now take a look at my website with 360 degree panoramas from Bali: Bali Panoramas

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