Sunday, April 10, 2011

Shooting panoramic pictures

With the advent of high resolution digital cameras and great software, stitching panoramas has never been easier. 


The world's largest picture (as of 2010) is a 80 Gigapixel image of the London skyline, available at http://www.360cities.net. Microsoft Research's Photosynth software is useful as well. You can view the beautiful panorama of St. Peter's basilica in Rome here 


There are useful instructions on how to shoot overlapping images that can be stitched easily @ panomonkey.com. There are many ways you can stitch the images together by yourself using various photo editing tools such as Adobe Photoshop or you can use web based tools such as Panomonkey or Photosynth to name a few. 



The above panorama was created by stitching three images with Microsoft's Image Composite Editor (free photo stitching tool). 


For an example of a 3D image created by the Photosynth software, click here to see a winter image of Pleasant Lake, Michigan.


So go ahead and get started, and soon the world will be enjoying your panoramas.