I love it when I find free photo editing software!
The most recent program added to my collection is an incredible panorama-making tool called "Hugin".
If you are interested in making panoramas, this program is a must-have! It's super-simple, yet incredibly powerful. It is able to automatically arrange and stitch your pictures together in a single panorama, whether they are horizontal, vertical or even grid-style panoramas.
I have been able, at the push of a button, to stitch forty-one pictures together in a grid pattern, and it was flawless! Since I downloaded this program it has opened up so many creative opportunities!
About the pictures . . .
Ocean
Taking a pictures of a crashing wave is not too difficult - the brightly lite ocean allowed me to keep the ISO down and speed up my shutter in order to freeze the motion nicely; but capturing an ocean panorama was more of a challenge.
Fortunately, my camera shoots at eight frames-per-second, allowing me to quickly scan across the scene before the wave moved too much.
Poppy Mountain
Located only a mile from my home is this magnificent view.
If you look closely in the bottom left corner you can see the road that winds it's way like a snake into the canyon. I was able to achieve this wide-angle picture by turning my camera on it's side, so the width of the cameras' field of view was vertical, otherwise you wouldn't have seen the poppies I was standing in. Then I took three pictures, each one overlapping the last - the more overlap the better. The sky was added later using GIMP.
