Matt Wronkiewicz’s Weblog

The World Wide Panorama is an occasional online event that features photographic panoramas in QuickTime VR format. The theme this time is beginnings. For my entry, I photographed some of the earliest structures in Ventura, which are on the site of the San Buenaventura Mission. On my way there, I stopped at Lowe’s with a trunk full of power tools and fashioned myself a panoramic tripod head adapter. It’s just a stick with bolts sticking out of it so you can attach your camera to the tripod with an offset along the lens axis. In theory this should reduce the effects of parallax when you pan the camera around. It worked pretty well. Most of the level photos matched up better than they have in the past. When I pitched the camera up or down, however, the parallax returned. You can tell on this panorama that the further you move down, the worse the stitching gets. I scrapped it and built a new two axis tripod head that should work much better.

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.