Picture of the month - November 2004

Hundshaupten Castle - Schloss Hundshaupten

My first panorama image ! Not really exiting? Might be! For me it's something special, even if neither perfectly made nor the most interesting motif. For years I toyed with the idea of buying a special panorama camera such as Noblex or Hasselblad have in their portfolio. I never was decisive (nor rich) enough to do so, although the ultra-wide or -high format appealed enormously ...

Now - in digital times - panoramas are easier (?) to obtain. Just take your normal camera (in this case my EOS3 with the Tokina 2,6-2,8/28-70 with the Kodak EBX100 slides film)
- put it on a stable tripod with a panorama head (my just recently bought FLM CB-58 FT did perfectly)
- adjust the tripod carefully to really cover the whole area without distracting elements
- take several pictures rotating the camera after each shot a certain angle and care for a certain overlap
- scan the pictures, use a stitching-SW (on the Photokina Arcsoft offered it's Panorama-SW for free this year!)
- finalize the outcome of 182 Mbytes by improving the picture transitions additionally with the PC
Conceeded - a long way, but at least much cheaper than a special camera, which I would likely seldomly use.

You look at the picture and wonder, why I took the manual override of the panorama-SW to cut the picture? I like the very special impression of the shifted picture boundaries still showing the original pictures - it's giving the whole thing an artistic touch. At least you can see the panorama was combined of 6 normal slides. Of course with the computers resolution this doesn't give a real feeling for the wide view, but imagine, what posters you could print from the data volume of 6 slide scans !!

 

Take it wide,
your Mr. Mooseman !