panoramas

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.