The first time I tried to take a panorama of this, I hand-held the camera and just winged it by trying to keep the same point of rotation. This time, I used a panoramic tripod. But there is still problems with the low angle of view. I think I need to get it about twenty feet into the air for a better viewpoint.

Later, when I was processing this panorama, I noticed the following tag. Sigh. People make me sad sometimes.

I took a High Definition Range panorama of the Austin Skyline today at Disch Field. And learned some things. I set aperture priority. Which was a mistake. The exposure settings changed slightly on every picture. Which caused color problems. Fortunately, Photoshop was up to the task of correcting the pictures to a common white balance.

It also took a while to wait while people left the individual frames of pictures.

When I went to Georgetown to take a panorama, I ran into trouble. I placed my tripod here. Which was on the sidewalk of a bridge overlooking a small river and right next to a public park. As I was waiting for the sun to set, I notice something odd. A man was standing under one of the trees and was looking in my direction. He waited for a while and then finally left. I thought he was looking at birds or something. But then a teenager walks down the sidewalk and starts confronting me. He claims that I was taking pictures of his house. I didn’t even notice the trailer off in the distance before. I didn’t bother educating him that my camera’s lens was not powerful enough to resolve his barely visible trailer., which was not even where I was pointing the camera towards. I just calmly listened to him and then told him that I was on public land and he could just sod off.

The capitol complex has a lot of visitors. Rather than waiting a really long time for people to clear from an individual frame, taking the shot, moving the camera, and then waiting some more, I decided to try a Photoshop technique. Which consists of taking a lot of pictures of the same frame. And then using an averaging algorithm on the series of pictures. It’s called “tourist removal.” Unfortunately, it was not perfect. The median value left visible artifacts. I had to take a more manual approach.

But that was not my biggest problem of the day. Oh, no. Instead of using a manual setting for the aperture, shutter, and ISO, I used the aperture priority mode. This caused color issues when stitched together. When Photoshop stitched the pictures and tried to automatically average the colors, something dramatic happened to the marble stonework. It gave the stone vitiligo. So sad.

I took a vertical panorama of a yucca plant, but Photoshop’s automatic stitching had problems aligning the top of the series.