For another project I needed some old photos of a friend and that meant going deep into my archives. We had done a photo shoot in Savannah back in 2011 so that is where I went looking. There was a folder with raw files and no indication that they had been processed for posting or printing. As I looked more closely at some of the photos, I saw arched windows. Well, there was just no way to pass that up.

Well, these are not really arched windows, but they look like it.

Closer inspection helped me remember that I had done a lot of panoramas and that folder contained mostly photos for wide views of River Street from across the Savannah River.

This also gives me a chance to tell you about doing panos. Alas, they seem to have gone out of favor a few years back. All the online panorama sites that let viewers scroll and pan around in wide photos are gone. So I can’t do justice with the photos from that day.

I reprocessed a set to give you a taste of the process and the results. But first the raw photos. Here is a set of 26, they are highlighted. I’m not showing the whole folder for a reason. I will tell more about that farther on.

These are handheld, overlapping images. They are photographed in portrait orientation to get a wider view vertically.

Here just three of them to give you a better idea of how they overlap.

These three photos are of the Hyatt Hotel. The one with the arched-looking windows on the lowest level. There is a large event space there. I have been in it several times, but I could not find any photos that show the windows closer, either from the inside or outside.

Now back to stitching a panorama. Those 26 selected photos are loaded into Microsoft Image Composite Editor – my favorite tool for this sort of thing.

Next the editor stitches them together. There are a number of options for the “projection”. You can see that I selected Mercator projection – a lot of maps use that method. The pano in the next two screen shots actually extends outside the view at both ends.

Note how the handheld shots cause jagged edges top and bottom. The editor fits them best it can. Note the message at the bottom: “Camera motion: rotating motion. Stitched 26 of 26 images. Spams 217.2° horizontally 32.9° vertically.”

The next step is CROP. There is an option to Auto complete. That feature fills the frame edges with appropriate pixels. Since it is sky and water, I figured it would do a reasonably good job, so I used it.

Note that the resulting panorama image is 28978 pixels wide and 4233 pixels high. That is 122.66 megapixels. That is what I exported. Of course, there is no way to show it to you in full resolution. Here is the image reduced in size to 2400 pixels wide. You see an even more reduced version as you look at the pano here.

And here is just the part that shows the Hyatt Hotel – with the arched windows.

As good fortune would have it, the first photo in that folder in my archive is of a window, as are the final three. I will show them to you in my next post, I have used already way too much space here.

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