Composite Panoramas

Composites were an art form when I was shooting analog film stuff. I never really gave it much thought, and when I first saw some results, I thought they were very interesting. I used to peruse the catalogs of Linhoff and thought about investing in a wide field camera to shoot analog panoramas, but I just couldn't justify the cost of that. Then a friend of mine, actually a work colleague was investigating some software that came out of a University Graduate program in Canada, and the result was something that could run on a windows desktop and was adapted to an iPhone app way back in the iPhone 4 days, and it did a pretty nice job of digitally stitching together multiple images into a single image. At the time my iPhone 4 was maybe 6MP, so I bought an Olympus E-410 on E-Bay for a few hundred to see what kind of images I could get with 11MP as the image base. The 410 even took care of bracketing, and with more freeware, I could process the HDR images, and then stitch them together. I was cheap, and this is how I operated for a number of years.

Eventually, my 4 became a 6, and then a X, and the pixel count matched my E-410, and I was getting really tired of the slow auto-focus on the 410. I have been an Olympus user most of my adult life, and when I saw where the OM-D systems were, I figured that the EM5 Mark III was exactly the right price point and weight for backcountry adventures. That it was also weatherproof, and when paired with the 12-40 pro lens, also weatherproof, this was a deal I couldn't pass up, and I purchased directly from Olympus in the US. With those base images, I couldn't tolerate the freeware any more, and bought into Lightroom. On a whim I went back and re-processed some of my E-410 base images, and was shocked by the improved results. Those results have been printed and now hang on my walls.