rit panorama

Panorama stitch

- Canon EOS 400D
- Sigma 18-50mm F3.5-5.6 DC ( no filter used)
- 17 vertical images [][][]
- Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.7 used to edit the RAW images and export them
- Hugin - Panorama photo stitcher used to stitch the photos together
- original size 13600x3800px ( after crop )


I didn't use a tripod for this shot. I have one, but it's not the best and I would have to mess around for some time to get the desired result. The tripod head isn't the most stable so I would have to use the cameras timer to get a still image since I don't have the remote. This would take some time and the light conditions on the each photo would be different ( not much, but still ). So I took the single shots freehand and at temperatures -10°C you wanna get things done fast and a tripod is just a slow down.
I tried to use manual focus to get as much as possible in focus, hyperfocal distance ( I could have calculated it ), on a such cold and windy day, my eyes were wet all the time, so a manual focus was impossible to achieve. I used automatic focus and used a point where almost everything seems to be in center of attention. On the full view ( original size ) I see that I messed up a little bit in here. The mess isn't only because of the focus, it's also because of the lens which is sharp in center but not at the edges. This is also a reason why I took 17 shots. Usually it's enough to have 25% image overlapping when stitching things together, but to get a panorama as sharp as possible ( with my equipment ) I took more images than needed. The shots were taken vertically because after the stitch is done, there is negative/bleeding space that needs to be get rid of, you need to crop the image. @18mm 17 images in one row are just fine, you get a nice panorama. @50mm I would have done two or probably three rows of images, so 3x17 images, I would have a much bigger panorama, with much more detail. Well, you also need a computer that can stitch 51 images of 10 megapixel at the same time, currently I don't have such a beast so, I don't do those hard core panoramas ( not yet ).
I didn't use a filter here. Have a cheap filter and in combination with this not so perfect lens I wouldn't get decent photos to work with.

Now, I had to edit the photos a little bit, used Adobe Photoshop Lightrnoom 2.7 for that. Didn't take long to get things done here. Basically what I've done was to make things a little bit sharper, reduce noise and fix the brightness/contrast. Those of you who work with RAW know that things don't look the same like on the jpg your camera creates, so therefor this edit.

Now the stitching, Hugin... a great program, lightweight, easy to use, fast. Basically what I've done is, I loaded the images, aligned them and picked a projection method. If I remember right I used the Cylindrical method for projection. After that I hit the stitch button, and then all need to be dona was to crop the whole panorama. As you can see I added some letterbox, how much you add, depends on how much of the image you wanna show.

So basically this is how I've created this one.

I was thinking of doing HDR, but there id no need doing that with this scenery, you don't have much color to get some great and strong HDR feeling.