Friday, July 1, 2011

Panorama image and landscape

Panorama is originated from Greek, means all-sight, and it is what it is. Before the digital capture becomes available, panoramic images although popular, they are limited to certain sizes – due to restriction of angle of view of a given lens and size of camera, of course.  Back then, I owned quite a few cameras made specifically or converted to take panoramic images, they are the mighty and beautifully made Linhof Technorama 617s the widest  film camera I have ever had, and I also owned one Linhof Technorama 612 PC II,  I also owned a Mamiya 7 that can take its proprietary accessory to use 36 exposure 135mm roll film for 16 exposures of 24X56 format image, exactly same size as the Hasselblad X-Pan which I also have – and all the lenses available for these cameras - that said – I have quite some panoramic image gear back in those day, but never pick up enough  momentum on panoramic photography, until the arrive of digital technology.
Of course one of the biggest advantage for digital capture is raw file that the photographer finally can have better control on his won image, how is vision interpret what he saw at the moment of capture.  And I would put the digital stitch the 2nd greatest strength of digital imaging, and since then, I started to take a lot more panoramic images, with exactly the same camera I use for regular photography.
For example this image, taken shortly after I left Litang. Before reaching the next destination, I stopped by a smooth hilltop, to take this image using 14 captures from Canon 5DII using EF 70-300L IS, the original stitched image is 28,060 X 3,269 pixels, and I cropped one of the section as the feature image on this post.

Well, may be someone has said it best, if you can’t make a good print, make a BIG one!

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