Maine Panoramas

One more post of photos from our Maine trip. I had forgotten about the panoramas.

I have a love-hate relationship with panoramas, especially really radical ones… that is really long narrow ones. They allow for a unique perspective on the world but they are difficult to present to the world.

In the days of yore film, one could not make really long panoramas, at least not easily. Film and paper came only so long and narrow and you needed a special camera to expose them. Splicing multiple prints together with scissors and glue was possible but difficult.

Digital photography has made making panoramas almost trivial. Snap, snap, snap; one makes multiple overlapping exposures with your digital camera. Once you get the files on the computer there is software that does the stitching of multiple frames automagically and you are done. Except for the bugaboo of having to show them to folks!

Some of the panoramas below were made to push the technology just to see what would happen. Stitching together four or five frames is trivial and routine. I wanted to try a dozen or more frames to stress the software. Alas, my experiment was a failure. Stitching fourteen or seventeen frames together was seamless. Sure it took a bit longer than those with only a few frames but it was still reasonably fast. I did not get out the stopwatch but the longest I waited for the computer to do its job was less than five minutes.

Some details…

Stonington Harbor and Winter Harbor Light are both more-or-less typical, straight forward panoramas. They each started with four frames. Prints of these photos (at their native resolution) would be roughly three or four feet long and about a foot tall.

View Looking West started with fourteen frames and would print fourteen feet long and about eleven inches high. Untitled began with seventeen frames and would print sixteen feet long and eleven inches high.

I might make three or four foot long prints of the first two panoramas. However, I doubt that I will ever make 14 or 16 foot prints of the latter two!

A note on viewing these panoramas. The thumbnails in the gallery below look rather ugly because of the way the gallery software handles large files. Not to worry. Click on one of the images and you will get a decent view that is the width of your screen if you are browsing in a maximized window. If you click on the image in this view you can get a still larger view which you can scroll left/right to view at the highest resolution available with the files I uploaded.