Panoramic Photography

I figured out that you can do some pretty neat stuff with image processing and a digital camera.
This image was created with five pictures, all shot with no stabilization other than my hands and no tripod. No exposure lock was used either, although the flash was turned off (even though the camera wanted to use it on the far right shot). The scene pictured is downtown Caen, France, as viewed from the top of one of the guard tower-things in Le Chateau Ducal. It was 2110 or so when the pictures were taken, so the sun was down pretty far. The camera was my Kodak DC280 and the stitching software used was The Panorama Factory 2.0, from Smoky City Design. Image adjustements and croppings were done using CompuPic. The timestamps were cropped off of the final images after stitching. Artifacting and blurring effects are clearly seen in the the final images, but it still looks pretty good (see esp. the top of the Cathedral).

Source images (click for the original, as used in the stitching)

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Final result, scaled down to 2576x480 to minimize loading time

This is a java applet called PMVR. I'm sure there's better ways of doing this (i.e. freeware), but it's a neat way of looking at it.

The software gave me a 16 meg TIFF file with default settings. The image above is a lot smaller than the original output; I compressed this into a 990k JPEG file that's 5318x969; 85% compression was used.