Here's an old panoramic photo I made awhile ago that I never gotten around to posting, despite the fact that it was one of my best attempts before I upgraded to new imaging software. It's downtown Burlington, Vermont as seen from the top of the Town Center parking garage. Black-and-white remains easier than color to match together, and is more in the spirit of the original McAllister photographs, but I haven't used it as much as I probably should. It's mostly about finding subject matter that matches the format, but here it seems to work out fine.

It's funny to think that for almost of the entire life of DEFORGE I've relied mostly on imaging software that was probably considered obsolete when it came free with my first digital camera back in 1999. In some ways, I think it's been an aesthetic decision. Much like how certain musicians play and record only on vintage equipment in order to pursue a distinctive sound, I've worked at exploiting the limitations of cheap imaging software to cobble together a unique combination of cheapness, cluelessness, and hopeless amateurism that is this website. However, that doesn't get me decent-looking panoramics, so I went Costcos* and got me some modern imaging software, the kind that takes five minutes to load and absorbs more memory than SQL Server. However, the real question is, "Does it make up for my shortcomings as a photographer, artist, and possibly as a human being?" Answer, as shown here, is "somewhat". It doesn't solve my exposure problems, but it does give me more tools to hide them.

This is one of the first I put together with the new software. It's a panoramic of Colchester Pond, and even with the advanced software, there was nothing I could do to fix the exposure differences and also at the same time keep some of the early Fall colors. So it was back to the old software and a run through the "Splash" function to hide the lines. It was certainly a start, though. With a little time invested and the right photographs to use, I may be able to solve this panoramic problem, yet.

As I've said before, and will probably say again at some point when I write the specific article for Urban Vermonter, Lake Willoughby is a remarkably beautiful place, even by Vermont standards. One thing I've learned is that if I want to avoid exposure problems, I should take into account where the sunlight is coming from. Unfortunately, ignorance and circumstances meant that I didn't heed that warning when I took this photo last Fall on an unusually warm day, and exposure differences almost kept this panoramic from happening.

One way I tried to save this panoramic was to reduce the number of colors used, which like the "splash" function, or any other trick that I've tried provides a chance to hide the seams at the expense of making the photo less photographic. When overused, it feels like cheating, but sometimes aiming for art rather than authenticity is a better target. In this case, I reduced the colors too much to look like a real photograph, but the result ended up rather well, something I might slap on merchandise one of these days. Actually, I did have it briefly printed on a stein, but it wasn't the right image for the item nor the right price point, but that's a different ramble.

This particular panoramic was certainly a learning experience. In early April of 2005 I took a series of photographs from an overlook by St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont. What I intended to do was create a panoramic that had Mount Mansfield on one side and Camel's Hump on the other. I took four photographs, but when I went to stitch them together, I found that the fourth photograph with Camel's Hump on it didn't share any overlap with the third photo. To add insult to injury, the first and third photo did overlap, eliminating the need for the second photo in the series.

Yet, I managed to salvage something from this mess, although there is some color reduction, this is the first panoramic where I was able to eliminate exposure differences without a significant loss of color or quality. Too bad early Spring is a pretty blah time to take a landscape photo in Northern Vermont. However, now that I'm starting to figure this stuff out, I'll attempt another from this location at some point.

Here's the view from the top of Mount Agamenticus in Maine. Once again, with only a minor reduction in color quality, I was able to piece together a pretty seamless panoramic out of three photographs. Of course, up close you can probably still pick out the seams, but you have to look for them. At this point, I feel that I've gotten a handle on the technical aspects of linking digital photographs together to build seamless panoramics. It may not be perfect, but if I can make them good enough to withstand scrutiny on a computer screen, I should have a good shot of making them look good on paper, too.

However, even with all of the work I've put into this up to this point, I've only started to catch up to where McAllister was probably after only six months after purchasing his camera. That is, up to speed enough on the technology of the day to produce a decent panoramic. But it's all downhill from here.