Photography - creating panoramas

berry120

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I've recently started playing around with creating panoramas from a number of still images as part of my bid to get into photography a bit more (we have some pretty epic beach sunsets sometimes and every time I look at one I wish I was better at capturing it!)

Has anyone else had a go at this? If so, I'd be interested to hear how you go about taking the images / stitching them together - my efforts so far with a relatively old digital camera and free tools such as autostitch have been reasonable, but having only started playing around a couple of days ago I wouldn't really know if there was a better option!
 
I've done this a bit. Microsoft ICE seems to be the best free program out there. The results from stitching were always okay, but not great. You'll need to use a tripod if you want to be able to frame properly when taking the photo. If not, just shoot an area way larger and crop later. I don't recommend this since it's a good way to end up with mediocre photos, but I guess it's an option. Other than this, it's quite straightforward. Take overlapping photos, run program, create panorama.

What you really want if you're serious is a panoramic format camera. Stitching is always going to create errors and weird distortions, especially if you're rotating the camera instead of shifting the lens. I'm not really familiar with anything in smaller formats, but you could probably find something 35mm fairly cheap if you don't mind having amateur level equipment. Another way is to use a wide lens and crop down, but this only works if you have a fairly large format, which i highly doubt you do.

EDIT: I looked on ebay and there doesn't seem to be much that isn't total garbage. Nevermind, stitching is probably your best option unless you want to buy into pro gear.
 
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I have recently got into this but my canon digital SLR camera has this function and I get some awsome results....Technology in cameras of late has increased dramatically.
Currently I'm searching through some old programs that came with the last few printers I had as they had this function in with their cropping features.

I find panorama photos can give some excellent results.
 
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