Panorama Purge

I must find some creative new name for these posts.

Back when I was still using the G4, stitching photographic panoramas was a long task, and I generally waited until I had a bunch to do, then rammed them through on a rainy, lazy sunday. As time has gone on, Lazy sundays are quite few, and that's somewhat contributed to the absence of panoramas in my work. I increasingly have a low patience for computer work that requires me to sit and wait on the machine to accomplish something. The problem either needs to be super fast so I can push the process forward (like writing), or super long so I can do something else while the machine grinds. Getting the images aligned required a nudge-wait-save loop that was about 10 seconds long on the G4. It was miserable.

However, that computer is retired, and the new computer is capable of panorama creation in a near real-time kind of way.

I found this out when I took the panorama of the back yard, and then used Hugin to stitch it. Effortless. Actually, way better than effortless. The more photos in a panorama, the more processing time and resources it takes to arrange the final product. The G4, with 1.5 gigs of ram, would start swapping after about 10-15 photos, becoming too slow to make meaningful progress. With 6 gigs of rams, the newer machine doesn't show the same kind of resistance. I'll have to take more complex panoramas.



The newfound freedom inspired me to clear out the backlog.

I had a set of photos from Hidden Beach in Northern California in 2010. The panorama really doesn't do the drift wood justice, though it does capture the remoteness. I wish there were beaches like this on the east coast.

I also had some stitched photos I took inside of some government buildings I've visited in my travels.