Fun With Panoramic Piccies

Pretty much everyone has a digital camera of some sort these days, whether it be in their mobile phone, a compact or full blown DSLR. Most will just shoot piccies of things they find interesting, many will make such common mistakes as always centring the head of their subjects in the middle of the viewfinder. Some will exceed the ability of their equipment, others will never even remotely reach it. But above all, everyone can at least have some fun taking and sharing photies with friends.

Which leads me nicely on to this sort of quick introduction to the world of panoramic photography. No idea what that is? Well the word panorama is (according to the Chambers Dictionary behind me) a wide or complete view, something that the world of film has been experimenting for years, think CinemaScope and other widescreen presentations and you begin to get the idea.

Whilst most often used for dramatic landscapes, panoramic doesn't always have to mean left-to-right, there are some really dramatic shots of tall buildings and waterfalls which use the technique to produce a strong image. That said, the principles are usually the same, rather than take one picture with your camera, you take a load and stitch them together afterwards.


Commercial applications have been around for a while offering the ability to do this, but thanks to the wonders of open source software combined with very generous coders who understand all the mathematics involved, there is an excellent free offering that pretty much does everything you could want for panoramic creation.

Hugin is actually a collection of applications, most of which run from the command line and are therefore a bit beyond some people, all brought together with a central graphical user interface (or GUI if you are the sort of person who answers "a blue one" when someone asks what computer you've got). It comes in not only a Windows version, but also for Linux and Mac OSX flavours too, so everyone can enjoy this fun new pass-time.

So how do you go about taking such a picture? Well I popped next door to the landing stage of my local lake, decided where I would start and where I would finish, set the exposure on my camera to manual so each shot would be the same brightness, adjusted the lens to get the right amount of sky and ground in shot, flipped the camera over and shot a set of 12 overlapping images.

Now don't panic if you don't have a tripod, it isn't completely necessary although it can help and many advocates recommend its use. But I'm certainly saving it for more serious goes, at the moment I'm just playing around and having fun. The most important things are you don't change your position, you try and keep the exposure of each image the same (although the software will do it's best to fix it if you don't, so panic not if you can't work out how to do that), and you overlap the images enough so that the software can match them up together afterwards.

Next up, you copy the images from your camera to your computer, then load Hugin and follow its very simple three step wizard like interface. This involves loading the images into the program, telling it what effective lens and field of view you were using, clicking the Align button, then clicking Create Panorama. After a time period dependant on how fast your PC is, how big the images are, and your perception of time in general, what you get out the other end is something like the image below.



I'm hoping this doesn't seem overly complicated, because it really isn't. You can experiment and exert more control over the whole process, depending on the quality of your camera and the expertise. It may also not work first time and may require human intervention if the control points it has used to match one image to another aren't distinct enough.

And don't let owning a cheap camera put you off having a go either, just look at this composite image taken by David Bergman of President Obama's inauguration. It is composed of 220 images taken with a Canon Powershot G10, something that despite it's 14MP resolution is not exactly a DSLR. So if he can do that, with an automated mount, the likes of us should be at least able to capture our favourite buildings and landscapes.

Further Reading

Have a quick read of this page on Wikipedia if you want to know more about panoramic photography in general, including a brief history.

Also check out a load of links to tutorials on various uses for the open source Hugin software, which amongst other things can be used for extending depth of field, along with some pre-processing for HDR work. I'll be doing a bit on HDR photography in a later update, it is in some ways even more cool than panoramic stuff!

This Week's Videos

If you've ever played Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Tap Tap Revenge or any of the other titles in this genre, you might appreciate this Cowbell Hero clip. I do like a quick gag, especially one that doesn't outstay its welcome.



Next we have a bunch of guys simply throwing drinks cans into bins, only they don't do it simply.