High Resolution Panoramas
Having grown up in a small town in a country full of mountains I got used to having view in front of my eyes. Only when I moved into large cities I realised what that meant and how it felt looking at the wall oft the neighbour’a building. So I chose to live, whenever possible in the higher floors. In Paris I was living in the 9th floor getting a beautiful view over the south of the city with the Gare de Lion and it’s clock tower (tate clock often stopped) Unfortunately my photo hobby had not yet kicked in then and so no good shots exist of that scenery. In Tokyo I moved to an apartment in the 32 floor that gives me a fantastic 180 degrees view over the the city with the mount Fuji as a backdrop. I can see wonderfull sceneries in the sky and dramatic sunsets. But even so I always have an urge where ever I go to climb a hill, a tower or mountain to get vantage point view of the world below. For long time I tried to a capture the scenery with wide angle lenses but I was never satisfied with the detail. At some point I started assembling wide angle photos from several shots and also wide angle panoramas. I don’t use Photoshop but have found with Hugin, an open source panorama stitcher an excellent tool for it. http://hugin.sourceforge.net. Trial and error has produced some good results but it is essential to be very careful when taking the pictures. More than not the results were disappointing because of a mistake forgetting to set the camera to manual mode or by missing a bit in the panorama. I recently found a nice tutorial by Nasim Mansurov: http://photographylife.com/panoramic-photography-howto
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