Cotswold Panoramas
I had to go and run an errand last night up to Northampton. As the weather was good and sunny, and time was not such an issue, I decided to take the more A361 road through the cotswolds.
I was leaving at 8pm from Swindon, and decided to take the camera with me, with the intention of taking some shots of anything that took my fancy. I’d also been wanting to do some panorama shots, so I downloaded Arcsoft Panorama Maker 4, and went out and did some shooting to make a panorama.
Panorama Maker 4
Give it a whirl. It’s so simple, and results are really excellent. Just take some photots in a line, give them to Panorama Maker and it stitches them. Really simple.
The Shots
This was taken near Burford. Looking at it now, I’m pleased with it. But it was so beautiful, that I’m not sure that any photo could ever do it justice.
Near Shipton-under-Wychwood, I hopped into a farmer’s field to take a shot of a dry stone wall and accompanying hedge.
A panorama of the same field after I’d hopped back over.
Advice
One thing that I didn’t do was to ensure consistency across each of the images used in the panorama.
If you look at the image on the left, you can see that one side is more orange than the other and that the ground is darker/lighter. This is because I set each of the shots up to process automatically. So, as I turned the camera, it took in less light, and so adjusted the camera to compensate. I should have fixed the aperture/shutter to ensure that this didn’t happen.
I took the shots with a Canon Powershot A90. It’s a point and shoot, but gives a lot of flexibility. It also looks like I may be able to easily keep the shots consistent using the landscape mode on the camera.
Another problem can be seen here. One side of the photo is blurred, the other is not. This may be due to camera shake, in which case, I should use the tripod. Alternatively, it could be due to the automatic focus and each shot of the panorama doing a centre focus, but that in one, the grass was closer to the point the camera was focussing on.
I’m going to do some more of these. There’s plenty of countryside around Swindon that these sort of shots can work.
If anyone would like a full-scale of the landscapes. Let me know. The originals are much larger, but reduced in size here to reduce your loading time.
RSS
Is the blur you mention in your last picture where two pictures are stitched together? This could be imperfect alignment, I’ve had that on a few of my panoramas. I use PanoramaFactory which also allows you to manually stitch the pictures together, that helped quite a bit to improve my "free hand" panoramas when I didn’t have a tripod to hand.
Thanks for the tip, Armin.
I didn’t use a tripod, and I was shooting in reasonably low light without flash and getting warning of camera shake. It’s not an issue at the scale of the photos on the site, but it would be when enlarged.