Back in 2009 I went to a training on how to use a Gigapan in Pittsburgh. It was a little robot on a tripod that would hold your camera and take a hundred or so pictures. You set the camera on highest zoom setting. Then you uploaded the photos to a website and they created a giant panoramic for you. Some of the panoramic we made were over a giga byte in size and you could zoom in super close and find people in windows etc. But they could only be viewed online at the website.
The other day I went hiking on Near Island with my good camera and a telephoto lens for taking close up pictures of birds etc. It was a gorgeous evening and I decided I wanted to take a picture of the harbor, but since I only had a telephoto I could not fit the harbor in just one picture. So I took like 20 or so and stitched them together at home with panoramic software I downloaded on the internet (software I have been using to stitch pans for years). The resulting panoramic came out just like the gigapans of yore!
In fact the files were too large (over 100 MB) to upload onto this blog and I had to resize them and dumb them down. So you can zoom in super close and look at details only with the files on my home computer. Still it is amazing what you can do so easily with panoramic images these days. No need for a robot and super specialized software to make a HUGE pan.
Patrick
No comments:
Post a Comment