I wanted a panorama that made me feel as if I were watching the sky from home. And I wanted a panorama that didn't take up too much of the sky. I took a series of pictures with my Nikon D90 at various focal lengths, but eventually used those taken at 18mm. I took overlapping pictures that were too close together, at first. There was a total of 14 images, but I ended up using only six. I started with a fixed shutter speed and aperture based on what I thought would work for the whole thing. I did not want to use automatic mode as then each image would look slightly different.
At first I used Panorama Maker 5 but the resulting pan was too pixelated and I didn't have enough control over things like the flatness of the horizon, etc. After reading Dave Howe's article, I downloaded Hugin and used that. Hugin gives me a great deal more control. My final pan is very big, 90+ MB. It takes a while to load, but the result is worth the wait, for me at least. I think it's 14000x1750. I had to cut that down in order to submit a pan. The version I'm uploading is 19.9 MB and the size is 6320 x 790. It looks ok in Starry Night, but the big one looks even better.
I adjusted the position of the pan so true north matches it. See the parameter values in the "Honolulu Hawaii.txt" file.
If you zoom in in various directions, you can see Diamond Head, surfers, boats, buildings, mountains, etc. The images were taken from the tip of Magic Island, just off Ala Moana Park in Honolulu, Hawaii. If you set preferences to open it looking ENE, you get a nice view of Diamond Head and Waikiki.
I spent a lot of time erasing pixels and eventually created an alpha channel, but I do not see any difference between this one without an alpha channel and the one with an alpha channel. This is not my first effort. I had used the magic wand of Photoshop but then kept finding holes where Photoshop had erased pixels that I didn't want erased. So I started over and erased them all by hand. Took a lot longer, but at least parts of buildings didn't disappear like before.
If anyone wants the big file, they can send me an email and I'll send them a link to that file on my Google Docs page.
My email address is samrhoads@gmail.com
Honolulu Hawaii.txt
Honolulu Hawaii 5.psd
Honolulu Hawaii 5.png
