I am a fan of panoramic photography.  Computer algorithms have gotten very good over the last few years at “stitching” even the most amateur shots together, and as it turns out, I am an amateur that is willing to gather the input data.

I first started playing with panoramic photography in Germany, and it’s become a habit — any time I find a wide open view and I have my camera handy, I snap a series of photos to piece together later.  We’ve already posted a fair number of the results elsewhere on our blog, but I have taken many more that we’ve never posted.  In some cases, I’ve never even taken the time to go back a stitch the photos together.

I’ve recently installed the latest version of Adobe Photoshop, and it has an updated function called “Photomerge” which does nearly all of the assembly of a panorama by itself.  This has inspired me to go back and look through our 32000+ photos we’ve taken in the last 10 years to pull out some of those unassembled panoramas.

With Photoshop, I can specify which photos to use and which mode to operate in and a minute or so later (depending on the number of photographs), I have a nearly finished panorama ready for final tweaking (and cropping, which I have to do because I normally work without the aid of a tripod.

Photoshop isn’t perfect, and it can get quite confused about how the photos snap together, especially if there is not a lot of differentiating detail.  Photoshop used to have a “manual” mode for Photomerge which allowed the user to go in and move around the individual photos before the final stitching, but it’s gone now.  I’m not sure why this mode got taken out, because for all the improvements they’ve made to Photomerge, it still blows it sometimes, as aI learned the other day while trying to assemble a panorama I took of Silver Lake Sand Dune – the plain blue sky and the bare sand confused Photomerge at several points, resulting in content both inadvertently duplicated and accidentally deleted.  I’m still trying to figure out if I can make that one work.

Today I want to share one of the panoramas that I took when David and Shirley came to visit us while we were living in France.  At the end of their visit, we drove into Paris so they could see some of the famous landmarks.  Shortly before we had to go back home, we went with them to the top of the Arc de Triomphe.  From there, on that clear, sunny day, I made a panorama of the Eiffel tower.  This was taken just a month or so before London was chosen for the 2012 Olympics, so Paris was still covered in the hopeful advertising of a candidate city (which explains the “Paris 2012″ sign on the tower).  

I like the level of detail that this picture shows, even accounting for the tiny little camera I used to take the picture, and the fact that I’ve cut the size of the original down by 20%.

eiffel-tower-leveled-21

Click on the picture to see it full size.

Taken May 28, 2005

 

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