Panorama of El Cerrito hike

While I was visiting my sister in Berkeley over the July 4th weekend, we got out and did some hiking in El Cerrito (town just North of Berkeley). Here’s my first attempt at a stitched together panoramic shot…

(you really want to see large or larger version)

Some quick lessons learned for myself for future panorama attempts:

  • use the same the shutter and aperture speed on every photograph (I had to manually adjust brightness and contrast on each photo above to even get close and I lost more detail than I would have liked in the process)
  • I used AutoStitch to build this image — but it unfortunately only worked on 5 out of 9 of my images. It didn’t link the other 4 into the panorama above. And it started out only stitching together 3 of the 9 — I had to tweak the alpha, beta and number of retries parameters to get it to recognize 5. I could have done with less intelligence on the part of AutoStitch. I would gladly have just told it the sequence of my images. Is there better photo stitch software?
  • A tripod would have been nice. 🙂 Without one, the alignment of each frame was off the next one by enough that by the end, when I was ready to crop the final product down to a rectangle, I probably lost 5% of the potential height of the Panorama.  Another way to approach this would have be to pad each frame out so that my target image would have remained intact, even after cropping.

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