Something different

And now for a subject as yet untouched by this blog - photography.

I don't own an expensive camera, merely a modest but friendly little Olympus which has provided excellent service for quite a few years now. It does have certain minor foibles and irritations, particularly the needlessly complicated system to activate a macro mode which has caused me to miss shooting several moving objects over the years, but otherwise it suits my purposes nicely. Of course I'd eventually like a better and more powerful model with a zillion megapixels, preferably an SLR, with some flashy filters and a fisheye lens.

However, one thing that I can do on any camera is make a panorama - ie lots of pictures 'stitched' together to form an image impossible in just one shot. This in effect is the equivalent of having a wide-angle lens, or taking a picture with better resolution than the zoom would otherwise allow. It used to be done by little more than trial and error: a film camera would be mounted as steadily as possible, a series of pictures taken and then, as often as not, glued together by hand, trying to match the overlaps as closely as possible. This method had obvious limitations, namely that the focal point of the image (where the light enters the camera lens) had to be kept absolutely exact throughout the series of pictures, otherwise they would not match, and that anything moving between pictures (trees, cars, etc) would have to be carefully removed with a paintbrush. In addition, the exposure also had to be consistent. Computer programmes have made the job of the panoramist considerably easier, not least because digital pictures can be 'warped' to make them align with each other, exposures homogenised and moving objects corrected or digitally painted over.

As with so many things, there's an open-source (ie free) program available, called Hugin (named for a Viking longship), which does most of this technological wizardry automatically. I stumbled across it a few years ago and immediately started experimenting with sticking pictures together. The creation of nicely aligned high-resolution photos still requires the user to rotate the camera carefully and expect some discreet imperfections, but Hugin will then stick the individual pictures together, correct the exposure and select the best projection. After a little practice, I've got marvellous stitches from up the cathedral tower in Worcester, the hills of Surrey, Berlin streets, Oxford colleges and many other places. With a fisheye lens one can also create spherical panoramas, the 'bubbles' which were so fascinating to us when the school installed Encarta encyclopaedia in its PC labs.

To reiterate: 1. this technology allows me to take photos with the camera zoom set to maximum, giving a much higher resolution than the same non-panorama image taken in a single shot; and 2. it allows me to produce pictures which are much higher and wider than would otherwise be possible, or which have an artificial focal point many yards away from where I am actually standing. It is also, mercifully, not particularly hard to achieve good results.

As with almost anything, there are some people who like to take this to an extreme. The largest and highest-quality resolution image in the world was, until November 2010, a 360-degree panorama from the TV tower in Prague which is 192,000 pixels wide and 96,000 pixels tall. However, it has since been eclipsed by a 400,000 x 200,000 pixel photo from Centre Point in London.  It took three days of shooting, and is of such high resolution that one can clearly read the license plate of a car parked over a quarter of a mile from the camera lens. Such endevours are not generally within the reach of the average citizen, requiring an expensive camera and motorised mount, software to control the shooting sequence, and massive amounts of computing power to stitch it all together.

You may see my rather more humble efforts via my Picassa albums, or else my Facebook photos taken any time after early 2009.