My love of Panoramas was partly born of necessity and partly creativity. I took some photos of my apartment when it was newly built some ten years ago, planning to stitch the panoramas together and never got around to it. It’s only this year that I found the time, and I was very impressed with the results.
Photographing interiors presents challenges for the photographically not very well equipped. Without a wider angle lens it’s often impossible to really capture an interior well. Usually because there is a wall in the way of where you need to be in order to get everything in, or you’d need to be in the next room or outside !
You try taking a photo of a small bathroom and see what you get, the edge of a sink, bits of doorway in the shot, yuk. With photostitching/panorama, it’s possible to get a much wider field of view, and therefore realise photographic potential far beyond that of that of the equipment. Making the impossible possible if you like, and I like the sound of that.
Also it makes for a much lighter camera bag or in my case I just use my iPhone, which means nothing extra to carry. For me one of the reasons I never used to take many photos was not wanting to carry extra stuff with me, I like to travel as light as I can.
Capturing the majesty of what I see I find very very inspiring, similar I guess to poet’s ability to capture emotional complexes in a few words.
So I’ve taken this panorama at one of the local shopping malls to demonstrate one of the many uses of this much underused and underrated type of photography.
I use PTGui Pro along with Photoshop Photomerge, Microsoft ICE and Canon Photostitch. PTGui is the best all round, and was used for this panorama, which consists 5 portrait shots. The resulting raw panorama is 39 megapixels, from the 8 megapixels of each iPhone 4s photo.
Hugin should also be seriously considered as it’s FREE, but unfortunately it and my graphics driver don’t get on.
Finally here’s the contact sheet :
(c) Don Charisma, photo taken in Thailand, 2013
Don Charisma 
Thanks for sharing the tips, Don. Have you found an App yet that will wrap the panorama into a sphere? Or an hourglass rectangle? I believe in Photoshop it’s a plug-in called Flexify that does that. But I’m a numpty at using Photoshop, I’m on a Samsung Galaxy S4 and Android Apps, or an iPad2 and iOS Apps.
You are welcome 🙂 All of my panos end up being cropped rectangle, haven’t as yet had a need for sphere. I think there maybe that functionality in PTGui Pro or Hugin which is free. I also use Microsoft ICE which is another free pano software … as for apps on the device itself I haven’t really tried anything, as I don’t do much with apps on handhelds.
Usually a few google searches point me in the right direction !
Warm regards
DC
Nifty picture!
Thanks I had fun making it 🙂
Well done. I like how you’ve embraced panorama photography. This shot is just great. 🙂
Thanks suz … the lighting in a mall is great, and lighting is half the battle with photography as you know … any camera with decent lighting will produce reasonable results, I feel ?
I enjoy the additional “power” that the panorama photography gives me, the ability to “do the impossible”/”perform miracles” with minimal equipment appeals to me 🙂
But don’t ask me to part any seas, not yet anyways LOL
Cheers
DC
It’s great when you find your niche in photography. Personally I love portraits and flowers.
And I agree wholeheartedly about the light 🙂
Start small though and work on parting your bathwater first 😉
Start of as a demi-god and work my way up the career ladder ? LOL
I like the scenes for now. I would like to learn more about colours and photoshopping portraits, perhaps one day I’ll put my own portrait on my blog, stranger things have been known. A “live” subject is a whole different ballgame, they move in all kinds of unpredictable ways, darn them ! I’m getting good at timing my pano shot with the waves so that the seams don’t need editing so much.
Off for my walk soon now, sunsets haven’t been all that past few days, no decent clouds … still I enjoy the walk listening to my music and always noticing things I didn’t see before, bit like life in general really 🙂
Sounds wonderful. Enjoy your walk and savour the beauty you find along the way. After all the work of a demi-god is to know his subjects 😉
Thanks … I tend to get to know the people that want to get to know me, makes for better friendships:)
Cheers
DC
You just lit my “Panorama Bug”. This is pretty cool.
Thanks man, I enjoy doing them as explained 🙂
Cool interior shot!
Thanks:)
Thank you for explaining and demonstrating the process. Very cool indeed.
You are welcome and thanks sharon:)
Great photo! Love photography, so thanks for the information. I take photographs when I can. If you have time, visit my photo blog at : http://photomontagery.wordpress.com/
Thanks, I like to try photographing different things keeps it interesting … just had a visit at you photo blog, some lovely photos 🙂 warm regards DC