Are you getting the whole picture?

While taking pictures, the field of vision is something that is often overlooked. A normal point and click camera has a field of vision of about 40°x35°. But, the human eye(s) provide you with a field of vision that is almost 200°x130°. Very often, you come upon a sight that is breathtaking and you whip out your camera and shoot some pictures. When you get back home and look at the pictures on a PC monitor, they don’t look quite the same.

To get some idea of what a short focus length lens (wide field of vision) can do for you, take a look at this picture on Ken Rockwell’s web page. The image that I would like you to look at is here. This awesome image is copyrighted by KenRockwell.com. If you are a photo buff, you should bookmark kenrockwell.com and subscribe to the RSS feed. I find it absolutely invaluable.

I don’t have this kind of amazing 13mm lens but a panoramic image using stitching can produce a similar field of view.

Panoramic images are a very cost effective way to get pictures with a very wide field of vision. If you are interested in all the science and technology behind the process of converting multiple segments of an image into a single panoramic image, you can refer to the FAQ at AutoStitch. There is an interesting paper on how all this works that you can read here and there is an informative presentation that goes with that paper.

Panoramic images are also better than short focal length lenses because there is less distortion towards the edges. Notice that the houses at the right and left edge of the first image above appear to be leaning. With panoramic stitching these effects can be eliminated.

Some quick tips if you plan to take a panoramic picture.

Set the camera to manual exposure mode to reduce the corrections that need to be done in software.
Use a tripod and make sure that you get a complete coverage of the area that you want to stitch.
Make sure that you overlap images by about a third. I usually turn on the visible grid in the view finder to help with this.
Take lots of pictures, there is nothing to beat practice.

In my previous post some panoramic sunsets were shown. I took several sets of pictures, such as the five below. These were then stitched together using a software called Autostitch. You can get a copy of autostitch at http://www.autostitch.net/