[WGH]

Here is one location I would not want to be during the rainy season. A small horse shoe canyon with a cave under the waterfall. The location is about 2 1/2 miles down a trail that is not on any map in the Catalina Mountains outside of Tucson. Of course this is the desert, so don't look for any water.

Click on the image for a Quicktime panorama of the canyon.


Wayne



 

[nathanm]

Here is one location I would not want to be during the rainy season. A small horse shoe canyon with a cave under the waterfall.

No kidding, especially with Gondorian archers taking aim at you.

Click on the image for a Quicktime panorama of the canyon.

You have finally captured a photograph of a Black Hole!  TWO of them no less!  That might be Nobel Prize worthy!

Great panoramas Wayne, what software do you use to make those?  How many shots does it need?

[WGH]

The black holes are the hardest part to capture, they suck all the life out of an image.

The photos are taken with a Canon G1, stitched together using Autostitch, tweaked in Paintshop Pro and turned into a QTVR movie using Pano2QTVR.

Autostitch is an amazing program. I goofed while taking all the photos and half were a lot larger because I zoomed in for the first shot and forgot to un-zoom. I re-shot and Autostitch took care of the rest. You can mix 800x600 and 1024x768 and any other resolution and Autostitch will stitch it all together flawlessly. The software does not hold your hand, you have to hunt around the site for documentation and then experiment, that is the best way to get to know it.

So I ended up with 153 photos that made up the panorama including the duplicates with different exposures and the different resolutions.

Wayne

[JohnR]

Wow, that's pretty cool! It looks though as you had exposure or white balance on auto (and not fixed)?

[WGH]

Wow, that's pretty cool! It looks though as you had exposure or white balance on auto (and not fixed)?

My method of photography is pretty messy, sort of the monkey with a typewriter approach. AZ during the day can be very, very bright, which makes the shadows almost black, and in order to get (most of) the tops of the trees I had to shoot directly into the sun.

White balance was set to Daylight, Av (aperture) is set to F8.0, the camera automatically sets the shutter speed. The Arizona sky can show up a very light blue, I wanted a deep blue that the eye sees, so as the camera was tilted up I adjusted the Exposure Compensation so when shooting into the sun it was set to -2.

My secret weapon is Autostitch. The unstitched photos look like a jigsaw puzzle, some are dark and some are very light. I check the Gain Compensation check box in the lower left corner of Autostitch which automatically adjusts each photos gain so when the photos are stitched the resulting panorama does not look like a patchwork quilt.

Autostitch Options panel