Frankenphoto

Quick post today. Last week I went down to the Library of Congress for an informational seminar on Somali language materials, history, and current status in celebration of it's 40th anniversary as a written language. On my way out I couldn't help but admire the main entryway of the library and thanks to some glorious December sunshine coming through the windows of the upper balcony I was able to get almost HDR like color contrast out of single exposures. For my photo stitching I used PanoEdit (available from the app store for Mac users) and then color balanced again in Lightroom3 post stitch.

ISO 1000 28mm f8 1/60sec

I believe this is a stitch of 16ish photos with some cropping round the edges to clean things up. The key to remember when preparing for a photo stitch is to have everything set to manual (AF, ISO, shutter speed and aperture) and single shutter shooting. Shooting burst mode for this sort of thing, fun though it may be, will result in image blur as you move the camera. Also, make sure you have your shutter speed fast enough that you will not accidentally blur an image while shooting. One of the most annoying things ever while doing large stitches is to have a great image with one section totally useless and thereby ruining your final result.

Final tip for large stitches, shoot LARGER than what you want for your end result so you are certain everything you want will be in frame. If you have a program like Photoshop you will be able to correct the distortion that you get from shooting an image like this and therefore you can make sure everything is frame correctly, however, when shooting like I do without it, you have to make sure that you have everything set up to account for the extra image data that you will need so you have enough to crop out the jagged edges and not lose what is important in the frame.

For the full on 9364x5425 goodness check it out on my Flikr account. Full screen viewing recommended.