I used Microsoft ICE to create this picture which consists of 36 separate photographs. The finished picture was 33 MB, I had to re-size it down to about 26 MB before any of my limited graphics tools (Paint.Net, Windows Photo Gallery, etc.) could open it. If you want to look at it, download it, open it up and zoom in so it fills the screen vertically, then pan left and right.

Two of the 36 images required adjustment due to an over-exposure problem, you'll have no trouble picking them out.

Ooops.. I am over the 9.54 MB limit. I've re-sized it even smaller now (a bit over 7 MB) so it lacks the detail of the original. Still an impressive demonstration of what Microsoft's free stitching program can do. Just drag and drop, and ICE does the rest.

tanstaafl.

Wow, that's an amazing property you have there. Lots of tenants.

I thought I was going to open a 360 panorama of a ravenous hummingbird swarm like none we've ever seen before.

What method are you using to take all the pictures? I mean like how do you make sure you get the whole area covered?

Anytime I have tried this I just am using a point and shoot without a tripod so I have trouble getting everything.

Could you put the source images up? I'd like to try running them through Hugin.

Have you tried the program Doug mentioned? You should be able to get similar results. It's one of the better Microsoft applications

As you implied, the key is using a tripod.

I set up the camera on the tripod and set the viewscreen to show the tic-tac-toe grid. I look for something horizontal (a roof-line, etc.) and match the grid against that to be sure the camera is level. I make a dry run (without actually taking photos) and see how many exposures it will take to cover more or less 90 degrees and then adjust the zoom so that I will have a reasonable amount of exposures. (The photo I posted covered about 270 degrees.)

After each exposure, I move the camera horizontally so that there is a 1/3 overlap of the previous shot, that's why I use the tic-tac-toe grid. When I have done the full sweep, I move the camera back to the original position more or less, then aim it lower, again keeping the 1/3 overlap but this time vertically. I then repeat the sweep. The posted set was two sweeps, an upper and lower, 18 photos in each.

I got caught near the end when the entire composition area of two shots (upper and lower) was the dark tree and the auto exposure compensated for that and over-exposed those two frames (relative to the rest of the shots) by about three or four stops. Next time I try this I'll be aware of the problem and for those two shots at least go to a manual exposure over-ride.

tanstaafl.

Is it just me, or do other people find Google's DropBox program unintuitive?

I think I did this right, but no guarantees. Try this:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/80789217/2012-08-20%20Rooftop%20Panorama.zip

and see what happens. It's about 160 MB.

tanstaafl.

DropBox has got nothing to do with Google.

I find both Dropbox and Google drive to be fairly intuitive, though I haven't tried sharing on Google Drive yet. Sharing on Dropbox is pretty dead simple, where you simply log into your account online and click on the little chain link button next to any file or folder. How much more intuitive do you want?

*edit*
Google Drive is indeed much more difficult to share with. The sharing features there extend from when it was Google Docs, where you were mostly sharing things like documents and spreadsheets with other people so you could collaborate on them. It was less like a virtual drive than Dropbox is.

This is pretty much the reason I still keep both services around. I use Google Drive for all my personal stuff and for things like spreadsheets I need to work on with colleagues or my wife. Then I use Dropbox to quickly throw up a bunch of files for another person to download easily.

Dropbox is also great for all the things that tie into it and for the mobile apps. I can send photos I take with my phone to it. I also use something called "ToDo.txt" which is a text file-based to-do list that syncs using Dropbox.

Thanks Doug.

I threw them through two different projections. I limited the horizontal resolution to ~16384. I think we could probably get about 5x that.

http://res0l.net/images/tanstaafl/Panoramas/

Nice. I like how your program did a better job than mine on the second-from-last vertical pair (the yellow house at the right side of the set), almost completely correcting the misalignment between the upper and lower pictures, and also a better job of color matching.

tanstaafl.

You might want to just lock the exposure for all shots, so that the blending software doesn't have to make extreme corrections for the exposure differences.

The most successful example of this kind of photography I've seen is where you do fixed, bracketed exposres for each position, then do HDR processing on the brackets, so that what you get is essentially three full panoramas at each exposure level, and the result is a full size HDR panorama. Not sure if you do the image blending first, or the HDR processing first.

An acquaintance once showed me his college project, which was to do that entire process described above, but do it four times, making four complete separate HDR panoramas, one each for a different time of day: Night, Sunset, Day, Sunrise. It was amazing work.

I was looking for pics and video of that interesting old film camera, it was shiny silver, looked kind of like a miniature Airstream trailer mounted atop a handle... you wound it up, held it over your head, pushed the trigger, and it slit-scanned a 360 degree panorama photo onto film. In fact, those cameras looked so unusual that one of them got used as a prop in Ghostbusters 2, they were pretending it was some kind of a ghost scanning tool. I don't know its name, though, and some quick searches aren't turning it up.

There are digital equivalents of that now, which is cool. But a little more poking, and I found this, which I now want very much:

http://mashable.com/2011/10/25/throwable-ball-camera/

Brilliant.