Picture of the month - January 2006

Wicklow Mountains
 

Ireland pictures are taking the lead - rightly so. It is a beautiful landscape and worth some pictures of the month.
By the way - a happy new year to all of you.

This time another panorma wins - mounted from 7 single photographs at 28mm. A well adjusted tripod helps a lot assembling the pictures later with a stitching SW. I used the Arcsoft Panorama Maker, actually the best SW I found up to now - the original Canon Photo Stitch delivered with the EOS20D you can confidently forget (I have not tried too many, so there might of course be much better ones ...). Some manual adjustment, as the Panorama Maker allows, helps improving the result a lot. In some cases additional fine tuning in a normal photo editor optimizes the outcome, which was not necessary in this case.

You get a panorama file with around 100MB size, which still contains empty areas due to the stitching. Cutting this outcome to the picture you see still results in a 87MB file - good enough even for large format prints. It's a way to increase the resolution as well ...

My intention is more to show the vastness of this landscape. It enfolds an angle of more than 360° - the street on the left and right side is the same. What all of you coming from countries with huge wilderness areas maybe cannot follow, is the feeling such a width creates for city-inhabitants living in strongly populated countries like myself. Only natural landscape (and the street, OK) - I love it. And it is not very common to have such undestructed views in Ireland either, as I had to learn during the trip.

By the way - I got my EOS20D back after a 4 weeks repair cycle- luckily on warranty. Anyhow - the first repair any of my  SLR bodies needed up to now, and in this case  just after a few months of usage. I hope this was only the exception that proves the rule (where the rule is, that Canon still produces high-quality cameras).

 

Take it wide,
your Mr. Mooseman !