Panorama.
Last week, I decided to create a giant panorama of Hayden Lake (map below). I have seen them done, rather spectacularly, of such events of President Obama’s inauguration, and other big events. I have even tried doing it myself in the past of Lake Coeur d’Alene. This one was by far more difficult than the last one though. I decided that I will never do it again, unless I get one of their machines that automates the process.
Essentially, I went down to the Hayden Lake dike, and placed my camera on a tripod and started shooting images from left to right. I ended up shooting nearly 150 images. There was some difficulty at the shoot, from the fact that the lighting was continuously changing, and there were some rather dark areas, so I had to slightly change the exposure. This, unfortunately, caused some difficulties when piecing it together in the computer.
After shooting, I put all the images into Lightroom, and did minor adjustments, and converted it from RAW. This took a while, but I was able to just leave the computer alone as it worked. Then I had to piece it together in Photoshop… which proved to be the most difficult part. The file was so large, it took nearly 1 hour each time to save it.
The next trouble occurred when I realized that the Gigapan uploader has tons of difficulties uploading large files, and always fails. It takes for ever, and always fails.
So, I sized it down from approx. 100,000 px wide, to 40,000 px wide, I was finally able to get it to successfully upload. It took nearly all night, totaling nearly 1gb for the jpeg.
Anyway, I am slightly disappointed as to how it turned out blotchy, but when I attempted to fix that aspect, I realized that it could take months. I tried the Auto-blend tool in photoshop, but I started it at 2:30 pm, and it tried until 5:30 when it failed and gave the message “Not enough RAM.” I nearly punched my computer. I decided that I should just get one of their machines if I want to do more of these.
- Center of map
- Hayden Lake Dike
- Location of camera
- Honey Suckle Marina
- Left side of image
- Hayden Lake Marina
- Right side of image
