A Stitch in Time

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What a day! I know this is the false dawn before the next wave of low pressure hits us this week, but it sure makes a hell of a difference to the way you feel. I was up on the studio roof - anyone that has been reading me for any length of time will know that running repairs are a fact of life with a tar-paper roof that big and that exposed to the elements - and took the panorama above: the house at the top of the field behind ours can be seen at the extreme left, so I'm facing approximately east. To the right-hand side of the image is the view west, towards the part of Anglesey where the boys live, so about 180°. I'd really like some sort of viewing platform up there with a bench, so we could sit and appreciate the view: a future project, perhaps?

One thing that's extraordinary is the ease and speed in making a digital panoramic image these days: the computational power required is truly staggering, and yet most people wouldn't give the 'how' a second's thought. Back in the mid-nineties, putting an image like this together would have involved a locked off tripod with a calibrated, click-stop head, a spirit level of some sort, a digital camera, half an hour's rehearsal and several hours of computer-time: in such low-res nobody would believe today. An iPhone does the whole thing hand-held [auto-stabilised] in hi-res: post-processing included, in about fifteen seconds; or the time it takes for the taker to rotate from one side of the frame to the other, processing and stitching the image together at the same time. Remarkable.


Comments

  1. Joe Stoner23 February 2021 at 01:46

    You probably forgot my involvement in our panoramic & VR makings because I was camoflaged beneath my Crombie overcoat in summer to be able to preview that said indexing head tripod mounted shots were complete and visually suitable to leave our super-computers to stitch the bastards together. I needed the Crombie's cloth density to give me reasonable black-out to be able to even see the mid nineties PowerMac screens!
    BTW you've got to bite the bullet on tar paper and nails mate it's Sysiphus al over again!:)

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