Project 27: 360 Panorama.

The premise for this project was pretty straight forward find a location which could be used to produce a 360 degree panorama and then shot it. The way to do this is first chose your spot and then with your camera mounted on a tripod begin shooting the scene by taking one shot then slightly turn the camera to the right or left making sure each time there is a small amount of overlap between each frame so that the software I'll be using later can join the frames more easily, when I'd rotated the camera the full 360 degrees i have all the frames i need and I'm ready to begin stitching them together.

The location i chose for my image was on the very top of Scafell Pike in the Lake District, this kind of grand vista i thought would suit this way of processing down to the ground and the final image backs this up. To begin with i followed the process layered down in the course material which was to use the free trail program provided to build my image. I got the results i was looking for with this program but the only problem being i couldn't save the results because of it being a trial and i wasn't about to pay nearly £300 for some software i might never use again so i had to begin to look at alternative way of producing my panoramic image. First i tried using my version of photoshop because it has 3D layering tools in it and i thought I'd be able to use these to take the flat image I'd produced using Photomerge and then place it into a 3D layer, unfortunately my computer isn't powerful enough to complete this process so i had to look for another alternative. Luckily i found a site on the Internet called http://www.dermandar.com/ here you can upload you shots and the online software will build your panorama for you (you'll find my image here http://www.dermandar.com/p/bOvlsf/on-top-of-scafell-pike). A real good find this site and one that i found easy and straight forward to use compared to some of the software you can download to do the same job which can be a little time consuming and to be honest quiet confusing at times.

Some points that i discovered when doing this project was that its best to shot all the images on manual settings so that you get the same exposure throughout the scene. Also its best to over exposure the darker areas as you can always fix these later in photoshop. One of the main things i feel is that some parts of the course need updating a little, for example here the software provided for you to create your panorama is from around 2004 as well as the offer for money off if you purchase the full version of the program, this isn't the first part of the course that I've felt this about as some of the other areas are beginning to feel a little dated. Its not a major problem but one that you need to be aware of.