Sunday, September 16, 2007

My First Ever Panorama


You'll definitely have to click and enlarge this one.

I've always wanted to try my hand at doing a panorama.

Yesterday, with camera and tripod in tow, I headed for the beach. I listened to college football on the radio.

It was a tug of war because I like watching American football (college), but really wanted to get out and about after our usual afternoon Florida thunderstorms.

So I listened to the University of Central Florida come within a hair of beating the University of Texas, and also heard University of Florida totally shellac the University of Tennessee.

AND, I got to take a bunch of pictures. I ended up taking well over 200, but probably 80 of those were sequenced shots to attempt to stitch into panoramas.

The one I put on here today was the one that I liked best.

This is the beach at one of our favorite parks here on the Atlantic. The surf was really mild, almost like the Gulf of Mexico. The water had a gorgeous light green color in close, but you can't really tell that in this panorama.

Anyway, thanks to Photoshop Element's photomerge feature, and then a little touching up by your's truly to make the transitions between photos look smoother, I ended up with something I really love.

I can't remember for sure, but I think this was a stitching together of nine horizontal shots, taking in a full 180degrees of beach, from looking left to looking right.

It captures a bit of the feel of walking down the stairs to the beach, and standing there, gazing left and right to take in the scenery.

Hope y'all like it as much as I do. There'll be a few more in the future.

P.S. My new Slik 700DX tripod that I bought a couple of months ago is a dream. It's big, heavy, and solid as a rock. I took my time with it and carefully used the built-in bubble levels to make the series of shots as careful as I could.

9 comments:

Jo's-D-Eyes said...

hEY!!!! John,
Now you really got me impressed!!!
You rellay did a great job man! Wow! So when you only use PsHp elements PF, thats even more impressive.

What did you use? I wide angle lens? And what's a Camera type"slik 700DX" ? is that a nikon or fugi or canon ? Or none of those camera's?

I liked the panorama very much!!! :)

CG said...

Very impressive John; i really felt i was there "in" the photo not just looking at it

Ben Nakagawa said...

Great job, well done!

Lori said...

You did a great job with this panoramic shot! I've never been able to figure out how to do it myself. I love the sweep of the beach, the sky and the ocean. How gorgeous. You picked a great subject for your first panoramic shot!

Chica, Cienna, and Cali said...

awesome, John.......totally love this one.....i think u have done a great job of it considering its your first panorama....i wish i could do this ....would you know of any software that allows this except Photoshop??? or if it;s possible to do it in PS Elements 5.0???

John Roberts said...

I've never tried piecing together a panorama, but this one might inspire me to give it a try. This one came out really nice!

Gudl said...

This is a really nice panoramic shot. I wish I was at this beach!! I love the ocean.
The last three years we went to Ft. Lauderdale for a week in April and we absolutely loved it!!

JAM said...

Thanks everyone.

Moi, I use Photoshop Elements 4.0, and it has a Photomerge feature for putting together a panorama. I'd be shocked if PE v5.0 didn't have it also.

I'd love to have "real" photoshop, but it costs as much as a new lens, so I'm sticking with Photoshop Elements which only cost me $69.

Curly said...

Some great photos again this week, I've enjoyed it!

Nice work on this stitch too!

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