Thursday, January 19, 2023

Panoramas from the past ...

In 1997, my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went camping in Death Valley. It was our fourth trip there to camp in grad. school.



I brought my Olympus OM1 and did something I thought could be cool with it. I took multiple overlapping pics of landscapes with the idea that I would use Photoshop or some such program to combine them together into large panoramic landscape images

The only problem was -- I did not know how to do that


But when I got home I got the photos developed and scanned them using a scanner I had and merged them with something like Claris Draw. Here is an example - three pics from the Sand Dunes area - and the low res panorama I made - not so bad but - well - not great either













I did the same thing in other places around Death Valley. Snapping pics and then when I got home tried to make the panoramas. This one is of Titus Canyon. Not so great but OK it reminded me of the place





Well, fortunately, I keep everything. And I got pics and slides and negatives scanned with better scanners a while back. And recently I was looking through pics and re-encountered these attempted panoramas. So with Adobe Lightroom I tried again

And, well, the results were pretty fucking nice. Here is a new stitched panorama of the dunes - probably going to get the printed and framed



And here is a remake of the Titus Canyon



I am so glad I kept my old pics in relatively good shape and got them scanned. And even though it did not work out so well at the time, I am also glad I did these "click and pan" collections now that I have better tools for merging them. This one is my favorite so far




















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