The links have been few the past couple of days. That work stuff again. I also spent time yesterday calibrating my pano head.

It's a simple device that lets the camera rotate around the nodal point of the lens. This means that there are not changes in the image as you rotate the camera. I bought this little device almost 10 years ago with the thought of doing segmented panoramas where you print the different panels and physically mount them side by side. It was a time of little money and the pano head was eventually buried in a box.

(Cue drums.) Technology marches on. There are a number of software image sitchers now that take overlapping images and stitch them together into a seamless whole. Now that my Mamiya is working again, it is time to take up the quest for panoramas again. This pano head allows you to mark the positions you want to use for rotating the camera. With the overlap for the stitching software, it will take 12 exposures to get a full 360 degrees. It's all marked now and I'm waiting for my film to arrive.

I also downloaded some stitching software — PanaVue Image Assembler — and went out on my back porch with my four year old Olympus digital camera and took a series of five hand held overlapping shots. This is sort of a worst case scenerio for stitching software since the images are not lined up nicely like they will be with the pano head. Put them in PanaVue and viola!

You really need to see the panos large to get the effect. I've started a Panos section which has a link to a large (403kb) version of this pano. There will be more panos to come and they will be from the Mamaiya with it's big negatives.

But wait! There's more! The makers of PanaVue take the image stitching functionality and apply it to the problem of scanning stuff larger than the scanner — like album covers. Album covers take four scans. Put them into PanaVue and voila!

I started to retouch the image to get rid of the over 30 years of wear but I can see that it would be another time sucker so I'm resisting it. Anyone want to see more album covers? I have a bunch.