Panoramic fun and games

No particular topic for today, except that while over here, ive been having fun making panoramas. A lot of things just don't fit into the viewfinder of a camera, so stitching multiple shots together can sometimes give a better sense of size and scale. And its also just a lot of fun! Cant afford a bug-eye 15mm lens? No worries. take a series of shots and then use something like Autostitch to simulate one...


At the top is the shinkansen platform at Nagoya station. Just above is the first of the big bridges I rode my bike across while traversing the inland sea (Full story of that in a future entry). Below is another of these mammoth bridges.



Ive used panoramas in previous entries - koto-in, the alpine route, etc. Some panoramas are obvious, but others can be quite subtle. Here is a shot of my favourite buddha-in-a-cave on top of a mountain. It is a composite of just two shots, and some clever photoshop clone-tool work to fill in the black gap at the edge. Normally, I'd just crop, but in this case it would have destroyed the composition.

Here is an interesting one. This is a stitch of six separate photos of a mural in a subway in Takamatsu. The tricky thing about this one, is that when you take a series of shots for a panorama, you usually stand in one place and just rotate while taking shots. In this case, however, that wasnt possible, since the mural was along one wall of a subway tunnel. I also wanted to preserve the mural without too much distortion, so i just walked along the length of it, taking shots of the panels. Autostitch was still able to handle this - in theory, this is no different from a bunch of shots taken from a single virtual point a long way away, with a telephoto lens.


The one below, taken in Shirakawago, is unusual in that it isnt just a horizontally linear series of photos. its a whole bunch of shots, 14, in fact, in two strips of 7, one catching the top of the island and the sky, the other the bottom and the river. Looks like something out of Riven or Myst...



I could go on, but I really ought to do some flute practice. So just one last panorama. :)