Britt's Two Wheeled Blog: Fun With Panoramas

The Great Smoky Mountain National Park

I've always enjoyed taking pictures of landscapes while I'm out on a ride or away on vacation with the family. I recently discovered free software that makes creating panoramas incredibly easy and I'm really happy with the results.

To create your own panorama you need to start with suitable pictures. I've found that my best results come from standing in one place, and shooting the landscape from my left to my right. I shoot three or four pictures, making sure that the ends of each shot overlap. It is important to keep the horizon level in each shot.

Once you have some good pictures, download and install Hugin. It's open source and is free so who can argue with that?

Getting started is best done after reading the tutorials. You can make it complicated or keep it easy as I did by selecting the pictures, clicking on Align, and then clicking on Create Panorama - all from the Assistant tab of the software. Maybe later I'll get more technical with it.

Here are some samples of what I did with the above method. The panoramas below were all created from three pictures. The picture of the Smoky Mountains at the top was created from four pictures.