miniQuest - Adventures for the part time explorer Panorama Tech
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Some of the trips documented on this site contain panoramic pictures or digital movies. Panoramic pictures require special equipment and software to create. A short overview of that process is explained below.

Panorama Photography

Panorama photography (as it relates to this web site) is an image that 'wraps' 360 degrees around the location of the photographer. With the appropriate software (or Java applet) the viewer can pan the view around just as if the viewer were actually standing on at the location of the photograph.

There are several panorama photographs on this web site. To properly view the images, you must have a Java enabled browser.

Panorama pictures tend to be very large. Because of this, almost all panoramas on this web site have been compressed to the maximum extent possible. Even with this maximum compression, the panoramas averages about 100,000 bytes. Picture quality greatly suffers due to this compression as well. This is a low resolution panorama. Here is a high resolution panorama for comparison.

Actually that panorama is only in medium resolution. A true high resolution panorama is about 3 megabytes.

Equipment

The following equipment is used to take the panorama shots on this web site.

bulletCoolpix 950 digital camera (by Nikon)
bulletWide angle lens (by Nikon)
bulletTripod with leveling bubbles
bulletKiwi panorama camera mount (by Kaidan)
bulletPhotovista panorama software (by Live Picture)

Source Images

The source images for a panorama consist of 14 overlapped images that cover a full 360 degrees. The pictures have a 50% overlap. The Kiwi camera mount ensures that the correct number of pictures, with proper overlap, are taken.

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Final Image

Photovista software stitches the individual pictures together to form a large image that spans the full 360 degrees. A special viewer program or appropriate Java code is required to view it as a rotatable panorama image.

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Tips

Here are some tips when taking panorama photographs.

bulletMake sure that the camera is exactly perpendicular to the axis of rotation of the tripod head. Photovista software has no mechanism for correcting misalignment of the camera in this fashion. This is a serious drawback, but with care, a little bit of misalignment can be tolerated.
bulletEnsure that the brightness of the pictures remains consistent. This can be achieved by locking the shutter speed and F-stop. This becomes particularly important with panoramas that encompass areas of unusual brightness and/or darkness.
bulletIndividual pictures can be touched up for brightness, contrast, and color by using PhotoShop. The final stitched panorama image can be adjusted as well.
bulletTake pictures using the lowest resolution you can get away with. Creating a panorama out of excessively high resolution images can take an extraordinary length of time. If you're only going to lower the resolution at the final stage anyway, start with lower resolution pictures.
 
Updated: March 04, 2003
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