Some fall panoramas for you

Lately I've been taken with panorama shots for a couple reasons. One is that the scenery in front of me was spectacular, begging for a wide shot. Another is that it's good practice to do it without a tripod, though if I was seriously trying to capture all the height, or compose it exactly, I'd put the camera on a tripod.

Plus, I'm sort of fascinated buy the software that stitches the images together. Think of all the millions of pixels in a pair of photos produced by a modern digital camera. For mine, there are 24 million pixels in each photo. The software is trying to find the common points between two photos. In a brute force way that would mean it would have to compare 24 million points to each of the other photo's points, or 5.76x10 to the 14th comparisons. That's a lot. Now think about adding a third photo, and the computer doesn't know if you are trying to build a horizontal or vertical panorama. I suspect the software has some rules to cut down the number of comparisons by looking for edges, corners, or other distinctive blocks of pixels. Still, that's a lot of processing churn, but the results can be amazing.

I love the rolling foothills landscapes in almost any light. For this day, the clouds were mostly kind of blah, but I liked these ones almost more than the landscape.

I was thinking there needed to be a castle or a walled city on top of this hill.

Sometimes the stitching software doesn't work, and you end up with this. Not sure why. I suspect one of the images was way off kilter.

Here's a vertical one, just to amuse you. This is our new central library.

Yes, one could build a pair of panoramas, then merge them to create a ginormous image. Lots of care in creating the individual photos, a powerful computer, and lots of time are needed. I haven't done this myself yet, but it's a project I have in mind.