Monday, May 17, 2004

Many people write me to ask why their panoramas aren't sharp, clear, and relatively free of stitching artifacts like mine (obviously they aren't referring to my 1996 panos that are still encoded with the Cinepak codec). Hopefully the following example will help to answer that question. Awhile back I was scanning panoramas shot on JMT3, a backpack trip from a couple summers ago in which a couple friends and I went from Onion Valley to Whitney Portal on the John Muir Trail. I was using a good quality 4000ppi scanner, and VueScan. Unlike some scanning software, VueScan has an option that is tailor-made for panoramic photographers -- the ability to lock both color and exposure settings for future scans based on an initial scan. Previously I found that when scanning panoramas with VueScan, choosing the initial image you choose to lock all subsequent exposure and color values from is critical. Even then, sometimes it is just not possible to find one image which is representative of the color/exposure values of the other 11 shots. So I ended up with this panorama, which was not good enough to post to VirtualParks. In hindsight, it wasn't only VueScan but the scanner was just not as good as my current scanner. This scene on a rocky hilltop overlooking Guitar Lake under the towering edifice of Mt. Whitney is extra challenging to produce. It was shot on a monopod where gusts of wind pushed the nodal point off. The cloudy lighting kept changing, and in fact at least one exposure was completely shaded while others were brightly lit by sun. The scenery is mostly rocks, so there is little frame of reference for getting the color right. So I set that scene aside. Last year I got a new scanner, a Nikon Super CoolScan 4000. I tried VueScan with it but it consistently didn't get the film offsets right when using the film strip adapter. So I'm using Nikon's software, which also allows you to lock exposure. That same scene is now on VirtualParks here. It's not perfect, not my favorite from the trip, but it's one of very few that was scanned twice, and I'm satisfied that it is close to my memory of what the place was like. The point is sometimes you have to go back to square one, as hard as it is to lose all the time invested to date. Also, every time you upgrade your scanner, every single one of your film-based scenes has the potential to improve in quality. Can't say that about digital-camera based panoramas! 7:19:43 AM

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