No, this isn’t an opinion piece about the merits of cross-stitching or whether to use cotton or nylon.
Stitching in this instance refers to photo-stitching, the art of combining several digital camera pictures to create one panoramic image. I’ve been fascinated with the idea since about 2002 when I first stumbled upon the website of Max Lyons, who apart from sounding like an alter ego of Homer Simpson creates some astonishing panoramas and stitched images, including one Gigapixel images. Which is a billion pixels. Quite.
Having read that and being a geek it meant two things; That it was very cool and that I had to try it out for myself.
Being fairly lazy and short of cash, I’d never got round to actually trying this until quite recently when I purchased a Canon 40D, which along with it came with a lovely disc of software, one piece of which was Canon’s own photo-stiching software. And rather excitedly I set about creating my first stiched image. And it was at this point I learnt this probably wasn’t going to be easy….
That photo above was stitched from 10 seperate images and has been colour adjusted quite heavily, which is why the original version is 18mb in size. And even though it looks good as a thumbnail, which is what that (slightly squashed) version is above, once you look at the original version, you start to see what makes this so difficult to do. In certain places, the trees clearly don’t “mix” properly, so what you end up a sort of haze effect; look towards the left of the image for a fairly good example. And the fact that the images were taken in burst mode and thus never had a chance to focus properly, a pretty important thing when trying to take these wide panoramas, meant that the whole thing looks slightly our of focus. Which in turn makes it harder for PhotoStitch to join them properly.
While that effort was fairly pleasing in the respect that I’d finally done a stitched image, I decided to scale back my efforts and go for something slightly easier. So here’s effort number two.
The problem with this one is mainly one of perspective. The wavebreaker on the left just doesn’t look right. And trying to correct this in G.I.M.P. just made it look like it was taken while I was going through the StarGate. Which I sadly wasn’t.
So, my first efforts in Stitching. Pleasing, if not rewarding. Like everything else, practice makes perfect and hopefully with my planned travels over the next 12 months I should have some lovely panoramas to show off by this time next year.
