New Frontiers in Panoramas

So those of you who follow this blog probably know by now that I love panoramas. There's just never enough of a landscape encapsulated in a single photo in my eyes. Within a few years of getting access to a digital camera I had figured out how to take multiple pictures of a scene and stitch them together in GIMP. This, however, is a long, painstaking process prone to errors. I think I've discovered errors in pretty much every panorama I've made sometime after making it, in the form of areas where two pictures were imperfectly blended. (The amount of work it takes to make one has always discouraged me from going back and fixing them, however.)

This weekend I discovered an amazing program called Hugin which creates panoramas automatically. Sure, I can create panoramas with the camera on my phone now that are quite high quality already, but Hugin allows me to go back and recreate ones from the pictures I already have, which is exactly what I spent most of Saturday afternoon doing. Upon loading in a set of pictures it can automatically analyze them to find matching points, assemble them, fix perspective issues, blend everything together, and spit out a finished panorama, all with a couple of clicks. It's incredibly fun to watch and see the finished output, especially comparing them to the ones I've made manually.

It's unfortunately a bit hard to see the differences (which are important, but subtle) without blinking between the images, so I don't think putting a hand-made and Hugin-made panorama up together would be particularly informative. However, I did find a few cases of images I'd taken with the intent to create a panorama that I never got around to, so have a few never-before-seen photos with this post:

This is a panorama from June 2011, taken from the summit of Mauna Kea at Puʻu Wēkiu on the one occasion I hiked there and remembered my camera. To the south, on the right, can be seen the summit of Mauna Loa, and not a lot else due to the clouds. (This might be why I never made a panorama out of it manually…) The view extends around to the north-east, where you can see some of the cinder cones (or puʻu) on Mauna Kea's north-eastern rift zone.

This panorama dates from November 2013. It's a view out over Kīlauea Caldera from near the Jagger Museum (where the people are on the left, including my friend Graham!). Within the caldera (which takes up most of the picture) can be seen the Halemaʻumaʻu pit crater, where the gas is rising from. I rather like this picture, so I'm not sure why I never got around to panorama-fying it manually. Another nice feature of Hugin that I forgot to mention is the way it can blend pictures pretty seamlessly, compensating for differently-colored sky in different images. This was always a big problem for me when making them manually and it's a super-useful feature.

This is another panorama taken at the same time as the last one, and from very nearby, but looking away from Kīlauea up towards Mauna Loa instead. Not much more to say about it, honestly—it's a different view of Mauna Loa than the panoramas I usually make (from the south-east instead of the north), and it does a nice job of showing off just how long and flat Mauna Loa is, but I can understand why I never felt motivated to spend the time to make this panorama manually.

Finally, this panorama comes from September 2014, from the time I visited Polulū Valley. I made one panorama from higher up at the trail head already but this one comes from further down the trail and I never put the pictures together. The color balance isn't particularly great on this one between the multiple photos, but I do like the view.

Anyway, I'm super excited to have discovered this program and I'm hoping to put it to good use with some more—and better—panoramas from Australia in the future now that I can make them in a few minutes rather than a few hours. A hui hou!