View of the Landsdowne Monument
I've been playing with my new computer, marvelling at the speed that it now stitches panoramas compared to my old clunky steam driven one and getting used to getting a stitch in less than half a day. I put this panorama together today for which I would welcome comment. I am also interested in whether the colours look ok as I invested in a new monitor to replace my old CRT.
(If you are using Firefox you may need to first 'zoom out' of the image in order to see it properly.)
Original panorama size = 8584px x 3076px
The view of is of the hills near Avebury in Wiltshire. In the distance you can see the Landsdowne Monument which is a roughly 40m tall stone obelisk. A white chalk horse (Cherhill Horse) is carved into the hill on the left (I think you can just see it's hindquarters poking out directly underneath the big cloud on the left). It was getting close to sundown and the wind was picking up, even moving my brick-like tripod around easily. Coupled with that I forgot to move my camera onto fully manual so ended up on Av mode with different looking exposures which I've tried to fix in RAW mode. At least I remembered to take off the autofocus!
Comments and critiques would be very welcome.
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Looks good. Not sure about
Looks good. Not sure about the flair. On the horizon yeah but the green one in the foreground doesn't work for me. Is it near a stitch (ie can you cover it) or is it in the middle of a frame?
Contrary
You know it's funny but I never really thought about it until you brought it up as I hadn't really noticed it. I looked at the images but the flair is right in the centre of one of the component images. I was unsure whether I agreed with you about it being a detraction for me but I looked anyway to see if I could do one without it. Then after Pat from Canvey chimed in with the implication that she thought it bad too I found myself actually liking it! I know I'm just being contrary but the more I look at it the more I like that flare. It puts a point of interest into the foreground where previously there was none. The green round shape of the flare complements the curved shape of the path.
I dunno, flare or no flare. I guess it's something that you find intensely annoying or just don't really see it like I did.
Crescent shape
Is the shape in the centre of the picture a path? and is it really that shape or is it an artifact of the stitching process? I ask because one of my recent panoramas of Colchester Castle has a frontage that looks curved after stitching, possibly because I was not central to the building in the first place. I stood in a place that was furthest away I could get from the frontage and it happened to be to the left of the midline of the Castle.I took 4 x 3 shots to get it all in in the end and Serif Panorama Plus stitched the 12 jpeg's in about 10 minutes.
Re the sun going down, I think I might have been tempted to do a second phase of pictures after the sun had gone below the horizon, just to see whether it produced a picture with less glare albeit a little darker. I agree with Dave about the lens flare. Would it have been less noticeable if you had one of those things professionals use ( don't know the name but call them lens hoods). On holiday with my little Fuji camera, when the sun was causing glare, I held whatever was to hand above the lens (or whatever direction the glare was coming from) be it a hand or a brochure from the attraction we were visiting. It seemed to work anyway.
Projections or the Math bit (but no maths!)
The path does look distorted to what it looked like to me in real life. This is as you correctly surmised, a function of the stitching. It occurs in nearly all stitched images regardless of where you stand with it appearing more pronouced on man-made objects because we know in our heads that they should have straight lines. It's all to do with the fact that the pictures you take are 'flat' but when you stitch them them together you are actually stitching them on a curved surface. The exact way that your images will look depends on what type of curved surface you map them to. For example, the panorama above was mapped to a cylindrical surface which normally works well for wide panoramas. You will get some 'bending' of straight lines in this projection (except around the mid-line which is where you put the horizon if you have one) as can be seen in your building. The projection that keeps straight lines intact is 'rectilinear'. You can see this projection in my Reichstag panorama. This type of projection necessitates you having to 'stretch out' the edges of the stitch to keep the lines straight so it's only really suitable for panoramas that are not too wide / have a small field of view.
A really good and easy to follow explanation (with pictures!) of different projections and their affects on stitched images can be found at Cambridge in Colour. It's worth checking out and the second half of the page with the pictures really increases your understanding.
Panorama Studio
Following your link to Cambridge in Colour, I downloaded the shareware version of Panorama Studio and tried it on the 12 photos of Colchester Castle. It made a right pigs ear of the panorama. So I tried it on the first 4 photos going across the frontage of the building and again it was a mess. It seems you have to do a lot of manual adjustments to get anything approaching the quality that the Serif program does in a few minutes. For my purposes, I think I'll stick to Panorama Plus. I don't have to input things like focal length and the position of the horizon. It does it all for me. Each to his own.
I wasn't implying that you
I wasn't implying that you needed to download their program. I was just saying that page is a good explanation of what different projections do to your images. If you're not doing a lot of panorama work you don't really need to use a program that you can control - it's better just to use something where you can just press a button and get something out ;-)
Chimed in...
That's a bit strong isn't it? I was only agreeing with Dave. You asked for comments. If you didn't like those about the flare, you should have taken issue with Dave and not me. The flare in my opinion draws the eye in to it so defeats the object of a panorama to display a wide view of scenery. And I didn't think you were implying that I needed to download their program. I chose to download it off my own bat to see if it produced a better result for me than the Serif one.
Whoa!
Whoa there! I wasn't all out of joint that you both didn't like the flare. I obviously didn't write my last comment clearly enough to get that across. I was replying to Dave. I was trying to explain why it didn't bother me and was revelling in the differences between us. I asked for comments and criticism and that's what I wanted.
As regards to the program, I was just making sure because from your comment it sounded like you thought I had recommended it and it was rubbish, and therefore my recommendation skills are rubbish. So I think we got confused all round as to what we really meant.
Peace?