Creating a Photo: Back to New York with British Airways – Part 11 – The Photo
Featuring the British Airways Airbus A318E.
Or – “World. Enough now. Stop it. Please. Pretty Please…”
- The Introduction
- To London
- BA 1 – London City Airport – Shannon – New York JFK
- One Time Exception: Apple Store, Grand Central Terminal
- Holiday Inn Long Island City Manhattan View
- A trip to a camera shop
- Time with Friends and back to JFK
- JFK T7, Pre-Flight Dining
- BA4 – New York JFK – London City Airport
- Radisson Edwardian and the Trip Home
- The wrap up
- The Photo
As the trip went along, I went from one disaster to another, with the plan for a night photo in Times Square going down the pan thank to the dirty sensor. Thankfully, the day before that royal pain – I did shoot something completely different that would make a great photo – a Panorama
From the 16th floor suite I was in I spend a fair amount of time shooting the pictures to this to get the image I wanted. As I had no tripod, this would be done the very old fashioned way – a very steady hand.
And this was a simple, if slow sweep across the area I wanted, and made a few attempts to get some nice panoramas.
With a straight import from the camera, I got the collection of images I wanted to play with, and after checking for no major mistakes in the images, I exported the batch of photos from Adobe Lightroom at full size to get a nice large set of working pictures to make the panorama.
The images in Lightroom – no adjustments made
This generates 15 images for me to work with.
A batch of images – ripe for stitching
For the next bit of work, I need to switch to Windows to do this dirty work – for those of you on a Mac, this is a switch to BootCamp, VMWare, Parallels or Virtual Box (take your pick). Providing you’ve mapped everything up correctly a lovely Windows desktop will appear (I’m using XP as I like something lightweight for this work).
To create the big panorama, I’m using a free bit of software called Microsoft Image Composition Engine or Microsoft ICE
Free for Windows 32bit or 64bit – have a download and a play
Once installed (Requires .NET Framework 4.0 as well as a variety of other bits), and loaded, you’ll get something like this:
Hit Cntl+N (or File > New) and select the photos you want to work with… then watch the magic happen…
For those on less powerful computers, or manipulating big data sets, get a cup of coffee.
And after a short wait, you should get something that looks like this:
Well – I coud had shot that a bit better. As you can see I wasn’t straight all the way through the pan. Thankfully, hit automatic crop… and a lot of the dirty work is done for you
So the image is ready, coming in at a small 15094 by 4388 pixels – or 66.23 megapixels.
Small image really… 😉
With that image in the state it’s in, it’s time to hit export, add a watermark, and then put it on a site to for all to see.
Long Island and Manhattan Sunset Panorama – (c) Kevin Marshall 2012.
Image licensed for personal use ONLY. PLEASE DON’T REUSE WITHOUT PERMISSION.
You can download a 5mb version of the panorama here
Eventually (when I hit the lotto or when I get a few hours) this will be a canvas to hang somewhere in the flat. For now, it’s an electronic bit of art that I hope you like.
Thanks for reading 🙂
Nice one. If you are looking for panorama software for the Mac check out PanoramaStudio. Used to be windows only and one things missed on the Mac… Now it’s there!
Thanks 🙂
Will look when I get a chance. I’m flexible with my software choices normally – nothing like the joy of a Virtual Machine to help out 😉
Thanks for a nice series of posts.
Hope you enjoyed them IMH 🙂