The August, 2015 Competition will be Panoramas.

[PuppyBismark]

Everyone:

Based my post asking for input on the August competition, it appears as if none of the suggestions rose to the top, so I have picked panoramas. I have looked at the topics for the past few years and have not seen any thing of this sort, so since I really like taking panoramas and it is different, I have selected this as the topic for the August competition. This means ANY subject is allowed, the image just has to be a panorama. We will also relax the size requirements to allow for wide or tall images.

I will publish a contest schedule in the next few days. I will be unavailable the end of the month, so Solly Mack has agreed to help on the Competition.

Panoramas are made up of more than one image stitched beside or above each other to make an image that cannot be made with a single picture. For the past ten years a number of digital cameras can do it or most all image processing software such as Photoshop or Lightroom can create them.

In addition, there are free software packages that will do the work for you too. One of them is Hugin available at http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ They have good tutorials and I expect that there are many in uTube.

Also, many digital cameras can produce panoramas right in the camera. I had one about ten years ago that could do that.

Below are a couple of my panoramas all of which were taken hand held, not with a tripod. (Tripod panoramas will come out better)

A couple of my guidelines

1. Take the images in portrait orientation for landscape panoramas, or the opposite for portrait panoramas.
2. If possible, take the images in manual mode to assure the exposure is consistent across the images.
3. Make sure the images overlap.

Here are some example panoramas:

Bow lake in the Canadian Rockies. It was one of those days one could not help but take great images. This one is made up of six individual portrait exposures:

link:

Pretty building in Calgary. This one is made up of three landscape images.

link:

Both of these were generated in Photoshop.

[Agschmid]

1. Woohoo!

Very fun!

[alfredo]

2. This should be fun.

[Mira]

3. Your examples are simply splendid! n/t

[Zeea]

4. Awesome

That looks awesome

[alfredo]

5. Hug in has some quirks, but works well.

I kept getting some debug dialogs, but I clicked cancel on them and it works well.

I also found that it is better to open Hugin, then select the images, than to "open with."