Pano Power

One of my photo contacts has uploaded a pano of the Giraffes at Port Botany from the viewing platform. Was great to experiment with this site and did quite a trip around. Never really been inspired by panos before but these sure whetted my appetite.
Was motivated to investigate some skills required. Photographymad had some great hints (speaking as a novice):
* allow 50% overlap
* use zoom at its middle setting to reduce lens distortion
* include foreground detail to add interest
* use a narrow aperture to give you maximum depth of field
* for consistency, lock as many of the camera settings as feasible
* choose a location with a consistent tonal range
* shoot in JPEG rather than raw to make stitching easier
Discovered that my Phone has a panorama option which gets a basic effect without fiddling around with multiple images and stitching software. Quite happy with the results

Photo Stitching Digital Panoramas

Stitched Panoramas

I've seen many stitched panoramas and although most effective I've never felt the desire to emulate the photographic feat.
Some amazing shots can be found at the 360 Cities blog

However I was most impressed to discover a site (PTgui) promoting its  stitching software which claims to work even with rotated and tilted images. The site had  some awe inspiring images in its gallery, including the world's largest indoor photograph ( March 2011) taken at Strahov Library Prague, created from about 3,000 individual photos into a single image 280,000  x 140,000 pixels. If printed it is estimated that it would be 23 metres long.

Image above promotes the release of the "Strahov 40 Gigapixel" photograph
"Image by Jeffrey Martin, www.360cities.net"   © Jeffrey Martin 2011