Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Panoramic Imaging

I found a link to this panoramic photograph on Mark Evanier's website. It appears on the Detroit Free Press website. It's a 360 degree look at the stadium where Al Gore endorsed Barak Obama in Detroit. As the camera pans, you'll see a blond woman, close up, using about a 600mm lens. I'm pretty sure it is Annie Leibovitz. I'll bet she's covering the convention for Vanity Fair.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended makes the creation of a 360 degree image pretty much a piece of cake. As long as there is about a 20% overlap in the frame, you can make such a panorama by turning in place and clicking away (with a digital camera, of course.) You put the "stack" of images into Photoshop and it will automatically stitch them together to creat the panorama. I watched Seth Resnick do this with photographs including the waterway in Miami and even the water trails didn't give it away.

If you own a digital camera and CS3 Extended, it is not only a whole lot cheaper than renting a panoramic camera, it's a whole lot less cumbersome than setting one up. From the description in the caption, I think this image was made using the CS3 method rather than an actual panoramic camera.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Autostitch is very easy to use, too!

M. C. Valada said...

Thanks for the suggestion. Since I've got CS3, I'm not likely to acquire it, but I'm sure others might consider it.

M. C. Valada said...

I just clicked on the link from tk and there's a great tutorial for using Autostich. Thanks!