Panoramas.

The human eye is far greater an optical instrument than anything ever manufactured by Carl Zeiss, or anyone else. The Gods, and dear old Mother Nature are still far, far better engineers and physicists than we will ever be. There are few instruments which have the dynamic range, the sensitivity, the colour resolution of the human eye. And although, I particularly hate the word 'zoom', the human eye is an instrument with an amazing optical zoom. One of the beautiful things about the placement of the eyes on either side of the nose, is that they actually capture differing images on either side of the face, which are then stitched together by the brain to provide a seamless integrated image which compasses a huge incident solid angle at the centre of the brain. This is also why we can perceive depth, that is, have stereoscopic vision. Animals like crocodiles whose individual eye images do not overlap have had to develop other evolutionary tools to provide them with the sensation of depth. If one wishes to marvel at what miracles Nature has wrought, then think for a moment about the compound eyes of insects like flies. The image processing engine given to us at birth is something of astounding, perhaps incomprehensible elegance and efficiency. And yet, we stand beggared in what we can see as compared to, say, a household cat.

One of those things that cameras have some difficulty doing is capturing panoramic photographs. Panoramas are images which capture a large angle of view. They are the exact opposite of telephoto pictures. Panoramas come into their own when we stand before, say, a mountain range, when vision is not limited to a few tens of metres, and there is great detail before us.

Camera manufacturers and lensmen have experimented for decades to bring such visual treats to a postcard print. Techniques include multiple exposures of a single film, rotating the camera and many other innovations. Read this wikipedia entry.

Anyways, I have been interested in taking panoramic shots. Not that I really have the gear for landscape photography, but its always worth a try. Anyway, I ended up with these shots of the Chicago shoreline from a small launch in Lake Michigan which were not intended for a panorama stitch. Now what is a panorama stitch? These days, with digital cameras, one takes different shots of the same landscape, changing the azimuthal angle of the lens mount in each successive shot, while keeping some overlap between successive shots. In plain language, this means that you mount the camera on a tripod, keep speed and aperture constant and take a picture. Rotate the camera slightly and take another picture, etc. There are funky softwares like Canon Photostitch which will then process successive images, find overlaps digitally and integrate, or stitch them.

Well, I was not carrying a tripod, I was shooting from a fast moving launch in rather choppy waters, and I was shooting in the evening, with very uncertain light, in fact, after sundown. So please forgive, and kindly adjust. I used Double-Take which looks and handles like a native Mac app. The problem is that the freeware version leaves a huge watermark. Anyway, I will try harder next time.