Early panoramas were made in 2000 through 2002, with a variety of cameras, lenses, films, and software. However, I've now pretty much settled on a standard equipment kit for panorama-bagging in the high peaks:
The cameras: Earlier versions of this page discussed the virtues of film versus digital. However, that discussion started almost eight years ago. There is now no real argument in my mind: for making panoramas in the high mountains, digital is the way to go. If I'm on a photo hunt and feeling energetic, I'll take along the Canon 40D DSLR and upgrade the tripod to a larger Gitzo. If not, I'll take the Rebel XT and the G01 tripod. When I'm on a mountainteering trip and light weight is critical (for example the Ptarmigan Traverse), I'll take the Canon S70 point and shoot. It stores RAW image files and has a 28mm equivalent lens, great for panoramas.
The lenses are perhaps the most critical link in the chain of equipment. I've settled on the Canon 17-40mm f4 L lens, an astounding lens in terms of image quality, ruggedness, light weight (for its class), ergonomics, and (for a Canon L-series) relatively low price. Buy one now.
The tripod is an important item that can make stitching images a lot easier back in the home photo lab. I use a Gitzo G01 tripod that is satisfyingly solid for such a small and light tripod. I use a Novoflex Universal Panorama Platform, with a bubble level, that you can put on top of your ball head. Level the platform in about 10 seconds, and you are ready to click off your panorama exposures every 30 degrees or so as your rotate the camera on the platform. It's so easy to make panorama exposures, I almost feel guilty.
Back at home, in the digital darkroom, the panoramas are put together with my Minolta Dimage Scan Elite 5400 film scanner running (for those legacy film shots), Adobe Photoshop CS3 for color and exposure balancing, and PanaVue Image Assembler for stitching the frames into a single image. Lately, I've tried a number of other stitching programs, including Photoshop, and have found AutoPano Pro to be perhaps the easiest to use and giving the highest quality images. I use a DVR+R burner to make 4.7 GB archive discs, and copy each DVD back to a USB drive so all my archived images are instantly accessible. Currently, I use a 250 GB USB drive, and two 500 GB drives. The processor on my image cruncher is a 3.0 GHz MHz P4, with 3 GB of memory. I run Windows XP and have no plans to run Vista. I make prints on an Epson Stylus Photo 2200, on Premium Glossy Photo Paper. The paper comes in 4" and 8" wide rolls, and my typical panoramas are 4" x 25" or 8" x 40". With a typical panorama representing 5 to 7 frames scanned at 2700 dpi, a 4" x 25" panorama comprises something like 50 MegaPixels, and the detail on the printed panorama is astounding.
The older images you see in your Web browser are IBM HotMedia scrolling photos or panoramas, built from relatively low-resolution JPEG exports of the original panoramic images. HotMedia allows me to embed Java applets which display the images within a Web page. You might note you can't save the images by right clicking on them. There are also multi-resolution JPEG versions available. Newer panoramas omit the HotMedia version.
A wealth of information on panorama-making can be found at panoguide.com. If you are at all interested in the technical aspects of panoramas, don't miss that site!
This Web site has (again) been moved to an upgraded server. It's now a Shuttle chassis with a Pentium D and 1 GB memory, running Open SuSE 10.2 Linux.
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All text and images © 2001 - 2008
by Gregg Brickner. All rights reserved. |