Here is a video of the robot taking a panorama of downtown Hanover. The audio is faint, sorry.
Robotic Panorama Maker from Max Rottersman on Vimeo.
I’m noticing that lights throw off the auto-focus of the camera. If I have enough light I’m going to have to close the aperature down as much as possible and set the camera to manual focus.
All the panoramas I’ve taken so far are tests. I’m looking forward to taking a panorama where I can focus on the artistic stuff.
I’ve noticed on photosynth that many people don’t understand what image composition software needs to stitch photos together well. It needs a common parallax. When you take your pictures, try to take each one where the center of your lens is shooting from the same point in space. Whenever you move your camera up or down, left or right, try to rotate it around an imaginary hinge in the middle of your lens. If you do that you will get great results.
A panorama head works by keeping the middle of the lens rotating around a single point in space, like spinning a basketball on your finger. If you do this, you will get really nice results from Microsoft ICE.
I used this technique to assemble 3 photos for a marketing picture of Quechee Gore Village. Here is what one picture from my Canon G10 can show.
I took three photos, left, middle, and right, all hand-held. I did my best to turn the camera left and right around a point in the middle of the lens. The image ICE has assembled is too large to upload. Here is a section I cut out, which I’ll use
This is a photo I couldn’t take by itself. I had to artificially create it through image stitching software. (I believe they’ll use something like the following for a background to pictures of all the fun things people can do at Quechee Gorge Village.) You can do lots of neat things with images using Paint.NET (and it’s free)!
