Christmas Lights QTVR
I posted a panorama of our Christmas Lights display here. This is my first panorama shot with the new Canon XTi that Darcy got me. With a field of view of about 65 degrees, I can shoot 360 x 90 degree panoramas with about 20 images. That would have taken 50 images on the camcorder. Also, shooting RAW images allowed me to do some tonemapping on this scene. This scene was particularly difficult because the reindeer on my lawn were so bright that everything else on the street was black in comparison. Using HDR tonemapping, I was able to increase the contrast on the scene without blowing out the reindeer. There is some noise speckling the darker parts of the panorama, which I could have reduced if I had increased the exposure time or shot bracketed exposures. This was actually my second attempt at the scene. The first time, I had the aperture set too wide and very little of the panorama was in focus. The second attempt, I set the aperture to F11 and increased the exposure time to 2.5 seconds.