I finally got around to processing some panoramic photo series that I took on the trip out west. I lost my registered version of Panorama Factory when I switched computers, so this time I set out to try to find some free panorama stitching software. Things have come along way since the last time I did a panoramic series back in 2004. The free software back then was kind of flakey and I couldn't get it to work very well. This time, I came across Hugin, which is a free GUI front end to Panorama Tools.

Actually, Hugin also comes with its own built-in stitcher called "Nona", and it seemed to do a pretty good job, so I haven't actually trying using the PTStitcher with Hugin. To make things easier, I also downloaded Autopano-SIFT and Enblend for automatic keypoint generation and final image smoothing, respectively. Combined together, these three tools make a pretty cool panorama stitching program!

This is the first and largest panorama that I took on the trip. It is a combination of 10 photographs that I took in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta. After stitching the photos together and cropping out the jagged edges of the photo, the original panorama is 21455 x 2178 pixels! This is obviously a scaled down version... it's only 4925 x 500. In the full version you can see individual people in the campground, signs along the road, and more shrubs than you can count. :)

Emotional Details: As I mentioned in my Picasa Web Album, I was really amazed by Dinosaur Provincial Park. It was totally not what I was expecting to find in the middle of the prairies. We arrived late and set up our tent as the sun was going down, so we didn't have much time to explore that night. It was also very buggy... much worse than anywhere else on this trip, including Banff where the mosquitoes were so thick that they wouldn't let us book a campsite for more than one night for fear that we wouldn't be able to hack it and demand a refund. It was hot as well... so hot that we didn't use our sleeping bag and it was still almost too hot to sleep. Anyway, we survived the night and the next morning we just walked a few meters from our campsite up the closest hill. This is the view that we saw from up there. It was pretty cool.

Technical details: All 10 images were shot with my Rebel XT + kit lens at 55mm, ISO 100, f/8 for 1/200th of a second. For some reason I didn't lock the focus when I took the shots, so one of the photos wound up slightly out of focus with respect to the others. That's a good lesson to learn. Luckily it is only noticeable in the full resolution image. Lesson learned!

Comments

That's a nice panorama, and it looks like the stitcher did a good job too.

It's the photo the optimists were hoping the Mars rover was going to
take...well, minus the campers.

Nono, I'm pretty sure they would have liked to have seen campers on Mars. ;)