View From The Roadside

Portsmouth Harbour, originally uploaded by Liam O’Neill.

I’ve tried doing panoramas a few times but have never been quite able to make them work. It’s not just the technical bits, getting the joins to look smooth and have one clean image, not the same bits showing up in more than one place, but also getting a final image that is actually worth looking at. All too often the result loses a lot of whatever it was made me want to make the panorama in the first place. Never the less, I would still try form time to time. This was one such time.
I’d been to Portchester Castle earlier and went up to Portsdown Hill afterwards. As you can see, the view from up there is pretty cool, especially on a sunny day. I took other more typical shots, but I just had to try another panorama. After taking the pictures I downloaded them to the computer and then left them. Making the panorama would take time, and based on previous experience, it seemed like time wasted. I finally got around to looking at it again this week. Incidentally, thats why I never delete a picture if I can help it. What doesn’t work for you today could well be a great picture tomorrow.
I first used a stitching program that came with the camera. It wasn’t perfect, the joins were obvious and suffered from ghosting, especially the castle, but it did show that unlike my other attempts, this panorama had a lot going for it. After that I found autostitch which did a much better job. A quick crop and resize later and you have this panorama of Portsmouth Harbour.
I was lucky in a way, I had no plans for timing any of what you see. The tide being out, showing the meandering path of the channels adds some interest to the harbour itself that I don’t think would be there if the tide were in. The ferry, the Mont St Michel arriving is a lovely touch, as is the cruise ship passing along the Solent, but I had no idea either would be there until I saw them. I also have no idea why there are flowers in the grass on the far right of the picture.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 11:52 pm and is filed under About Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.