Even as much as the Altitude Sickness has messed me up, I can’t help but be amazed at the scenery around here.  The huge mountains, running creeks and rivers, ponds, trees, and remnants of the snowy winter make the place simply beautiful.  I would love to take some pictures and throw them up here for everyone to enjoy, but I didn’t take a camera (Mental Note: Take one next time).

Even tho, I do have my little RAZR phone with it’s integrated 640×480 camera.  I thought about taking some pictures but figured the resolution wouldn’t even come close to representing the scenery around here.  Then I remembered some of the work I did long ago with Panoramic Stiching.   A few minutes later I had Hugin, Autopano, and Enblend all setup and running on the laptop, and took off to snap some pics. 

I started small with only 3 source images in each panoram.  The results were surprisingly good, but didn’t really give enough vertical display to be interesting.  I slowly worked my way up until I finally generated a big 41-image Panoram of one of the more impressive scenes.  The results were surprisingly good, but I did have some setbacks:

  1. The RAZR Camera is poorly documented.  For anyone else trying this, the RAZR’s Field of View seems to be 45 degrees (Hugin automatically computed the Focal Length at around 42mm from that). 
  2. The RAZR Camera is pretty bad.  I was unable to find any way to disable the camera’s automatic adjustment for light levels.  Because of this, the scenes of the horizon (right over the trees) are hideously overexposed, creating overly bright skies and siloette trees. 
  3. There’s just not enough resolution.  While the resulting pictures are interesting, I could have gotten a higher-resolution (pixel-wise) image with a single shot of a regular digital camera.  I do get a wider field-of-view through the stiching, but the lack of resolution adds alot of registration errors that accumulate to give wide pictures a strange "bend".

Nonetheless, I thought the images worth posting online in the new Peaceful Valley Panoram gallery.  I might venture out again today and snap some more pics, but I doubt I’ll get any significantly better results.  It’s still a fun hobby though, one I might try to spend more time with in the future.  And Hugin + Autopano + EnBlend make a great (free!) combination of tools to make generating these panorams extremely simple.  The 3-shot images I generated in just a few seconds a piece, with the 41-piece one taking about an hour.  It was initialy done in about 5 minutes, but I spent alot of time tweaking the individual images and removing a few of them that actually made the resulting image worse.

Update :
I’ve put 2 new panorams up, including one that I’m particularly proud of : The Large Pond Panoram.  The other one didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped.  But in all this, I’ve learned a few valuable lessons about creating panoramic images:

  1. Take way more images than you think you need.  You can never have too many.
  2. Take images at angles you don’t expect, most notably: Down on the ground.
  3. Parallax is not your friend. Make sure you don’t have any objects in the near field that will cause problems in the final stitching (Especially evident in the latest image I posted)
  4. Try not to move the camera much between shots.  Rotation is ok, but Translation causes discontinuities.

But I’m looking forward to trying some more.  I’m pretty sick and tired of using my Razr for this, so I’m looking forward to using a better camera.  Now I’ve just gotta find something to shoot. [tag:hugin][tag:panoram][tag:picture][tag:photo]

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