I am proud to have one of my photographs published in a book of panoramas “Kolor PANOBOOK 2009″ ISBN: 978-2-9533296-0-5. The photo was taken in August 2008 from the top of Coit Tower San Francisco and was 3 images taken though a tiny dirty window that were stitched together in AutoPano Pro.
A few years ago I found a great site Breaking the Gigapixel Barrier about creating Giga-Pixel photos by stitching 100s of normal SLR photos together. Some people have pushed this even further with a 13 Gigapixel photo of Harlem with over 2000 photos. So my Christmas present from my wife was a new tripod and indexing head so I can take photos every 5 degrees. As my wife and I went to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon over the holidays it was a great opportunity to try to take my first Gigapixel photo. My wife has written a blog with entertaining tales of our travels fionapotts.com. Well I did not break the Giga-Pixel barrier I managed to get to 733Mpix.
Its 127 12Mpix images stitched together in 3 rows every 5 degrees using a 300mm zoom lens. After some research and experimenting with different software for joining all the photos the best I found was Autopano Pro which rocks at auto detecting matching points in each photo and stitching and blending all the photos together. You can check out my results and other photos from our trip on my updated Photos Page. I took about 10 panoramas of the Grand Canyon including some HDR (High Dynamic Range) ones with 3 bracketed exposures per photo. Autopano Pro has support for stitching HDR panos but I did not have much luck as the was clear banding from photo to photo. If any of you have any tips on how to stitch HDR panos I would love to here. Well its been a fun break, back to fixing the last pre-beta Nimbus bugs tomorrow.
My brother in law is over staying with us so an excuse to go and do some more touristy things like visit Alcatraz.
I finally had a nice clear sunny day in San Francisco and a chance to take a couple pictures.
Fiona and I went to San Francisco Zoo on the weekend. We remembered to take sun cream and hats after getting burnt last week. What we forgot is the weather is totally different in SF to Santa Clara. We got there and its was cold and gray. What we didn’t pack was any warm cloths so we joined the main people walking around the zoo in SF Zoo hoodies. Many of the animals were wisely hiding indoors but got a few nice photos.
