Nature Panoramas

These spectacular panoramas were taken primarily with my standard Canon EOS Elan camera using Kodak Royal Gold 100 film.  Some recent panoramas were captured with my Sony DSC-P9 digital camera.  Various stitching programs were used, starting in the early days with Photo Vista*, then PowerStitch*, and currently Panorama Factory*.  Each panorama includes a brief description of the location, the time of capture and method of capture, and details about stitching.

Navigation

The panoramas are arranged in categories, listed in the second level navigation bar above.  Simply click on one of the category buttons, such as Tahoe, Yosemite, etc., to access that thumbnail page.

Each thumbnail page has one or more panorama thumbnails.  To view the larger image, click on the thumbnail.  Note that the larger images take some time to load if you are using a modem, but the wait is worth it!  Imagine how long it would take if the full digital images were available - some as large as 100 MB.  The images are carefully resized to fit on a typical computer screen, and represent only a tiny fraction of the true resolution of the images.

Once you are on the larger image page, you have several buttons in the top right corner for navigation.  This includes a Thumbnails button, to return you to the thumbnail page related to this image, and a Previous and Next button.  If the button is dimmed out, it is not accessible.  You can use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate between images in each category without returning to the thumbnails page.

Panorama Capture verses Panorama Crop

All panoramas in this section are true panorama captures, not panorama crops of single frame images.  This means that the true resolution of the panorama is much higher than a single frame image, rather than less.  For example, note the crop panorama of a single frame capture shown below of the Golden Gate bridge:

Example of a panorama crop

While this is an impressive panorama, it cannot be printed as a large print.  The resolution is only about 1/3 of a full frame image, or about 6 MB (1.5 megapixels).  Of course the image above is even smaller.  Also, it was shot with 400 speed Kodak Gold in 1994, when film was much grainier.  In addition, 400 speed film is significantly more grainy than 100 speed, my normal film.  Even resized this small, it is difficult to recover a true sense of sharpness in this image.

All true panorama captures, as displayed in this section, are much larger than a single 18 MB single frame capture, ranging from 35 MB to over 100 MB in size.  These images are created from multiple single-frame captures blended and stitched together into a seamless panorama, typically with very careful work, even down to the pixel level.