Stitching panoramas and things

When my wife Margaret and I were first married back in 1975, our first house was in Southampton.  It was even by those days' standards a cheap starter home, and yet it had a marvellous water view.  Our house was on the outside of a bend of the River Itchen, and we had a marvellous view of Southampton Docks which meant that once a fortnight we would get the most wonderful view of the QE2 without leaving the house!  I mention this only because it was years before digital photography and software existed, and the panorama I made was cut to size and stuck together with sticky tape.

As you can see, or rather not see, in spite of levelling,cropping and fiddling with the colour and exposure, these 39 year-old pictures on cheap colour film, processed in goodness knows what conditions and picked up from the chemists, is at best a record shot which shows how lucky we were, without being really aware of it.  What developer today would even build three bedroom semi detached houses on a site like that?  There were always tons of interesting things, huge Black Backed Gulls (you can just see one in the third picture along)  which not only fished, but had the nasty habit of eating not just fish, but other birds eggs and hatchlings.

Ocean Liners, then still in existence, sailed off to New York, and South Africa, ferries went to Cherbourg and Le Havre, and the red hulled Antarctic Survey Vessels used to moor right opposite us during the Southern Winter.

I didn't even think of doing panorama shots again until the digital age and the advent of picture processing technology.  Below is a picture of Sydney Harbour from Fort Denison, the last Martello Tower to be built in the world as a defence against the French.  Presumably no-one told the locals that the French had been defeated at Waterloo in 1815, almost forty years previously, and Napoleon had already died on St Helena before the fort was built!

Mentioning Napoleon, he very nearly came to Sydney.  The Comte de la Perouse wanted to choose his officers for his world round trip from the Ecole Militaire in Paris.  A small Corsican named Bonaparte failed the interview, otherwise he would have reached Botany Bay in January 1788, literally only about two days after Captain Philip arrived with the first settlers and convicts.

But back to panoramas.

These days digital cameras and even some phones, have a panorama button, which one presses while moving the apparatus smoothly.  I don't have a steady hand, and so I take my panoramas using individual shots which I stitch together using software.

This is the one that I took from Fort Denison.  You can see that it is composed from six or seven standard photos.

As you can see, there are a number of extraneous bits around the edge which need cropping out, and various adjustments need to be made to the panoramic shot before it is finally cropped.

People pay over $1000 per plate to have a New Year's Eve Dinner here, but then the view of the world-famous Sydney fireworks is totally unobstructed, and there are no huge crowds to contend with.

Just to orient you, on the South side of the Harbour (actually called Port Jackson), on the left is the Sydney Tower and the rest of the centre of Sydney; the Opera House, which is built on the site of an old Tram Depot at Bennelong Point, and finally the magnificent Harbour Bridge, built as a Depression project at the end of the 20s/early 30s.  It was built on a grand scale in spite of there being comparatively limited traffic.  Today it has six lanes of roads and a two track railway, and a walkway on one side and a cycle path on the other.  For many years it was the widest bridge in the world.  What wonderful forward planning!

But now I'm going to put in a photographic interval.

As I'm not a very good photographer, because physically I have a tremor, I always get a small amount of camera shake.  As a result I like to play about and experiment perhaps a little more than most.

Below is probably the most important photo I have ever taken, not because it is artistic because it isn't; not because it is particularly good, because it isn't.  It is the end of our street taken with a series of photos that have been stitched together in two directions.  A two-dimensional panorama.

I haven't counted, but there must be approximately twenty exposures in this picture.  But there was another important result for me.  I printed off the individual shots as 6 x 4 s and glued them together to make a large picture of the scene.  So successful was this experiment, that within the month, I tackled a far larger project.

I went with a couple of Club members, Alan and Jenny, to the Bridge museum in the south east pylon of the Sydney Harbour Bridge (the bridge tower nearest the Opera House) and took a lot of shots to stitch together, if possible, to form a two-dimensional picture.

And this is it.  My best and largest two dimensional picture of the Sydney Harbour Bridge from the south east pylon.  You will notice that it is an unusual view of the bridge (hereafter known as the SHB) because you are quite high up so that it appears that you are looking down on the arch, but as it soon became evident, there was another problem.  The picture was slightly portrait formatted!

Once again I decided to try the 6 x 4 technique, but this time I printed them in sepia, as being more appropriate for a middle-aged engineering marvel.

Actually I did it because the light was extremely flat, and sepia gave me a greater tonal range.  Then to increase the challenge I took each 6 x 4 and cut it into five two centimetre strips, and glued it together like a giant collage.  To give you an idea of the scale of the finished work before framing, I have included the photo of the SHB picture below.

This happy result has a down side, though.  Because the collage of the SHB was such a success, I was encouraged to do a similar picture of the Sydney Opera House, so that they could hang next to each other.

But that, we are all relieved to hear, is another story.