I have to admit that I have a real love of the panoramic format and will shoot panoramic whenever the opportunity arises. Whilst I am the proud owner of an XPan which produces amazing panoramic, I don’t always want to shoot film. This often means carrying two camera systems which isn’t very practical, especially in the mountains.

 

The solution to the problem is of course to shoot digitally multiple images and then stitch these together. Unfortunately this is proving more difficult than you might imagine. Virtually none of the stitching packages that I have tried (and there have been quite a lot) have failed to live up to their hype. I am sure many of these packages rely on users not looking critically at the finished image.

 

Take the examples image here which is created from 3 hand held shots (one of my criteria is that the packages can deal with handholding). In my tests, at least half the packages failed to make a decent job of stitching the images. Image detailed was blurred at the seams, some failed to blend the exposures properly and one actually created a colour shift. I have found a couple that seem to work well but its early days. I might include more information in my next newsletter.

 

In case you are wondering, this was shot at Wastwater in the Lake District back in October 09.