Sagebrush personal hiking blog
“A good snapshot keeps a moment from running away.”
— Eudora Welty
AT2012 Panorama Photos describes how to stitch photos into panoramic views. The resulting photos may have more pixels than your computer monitor, so today we show how a web viewer may allow you to scroll and zoom within the panorama. For each of these panoramas, view by clicking the full-screen control and click-drag to move around and use the mouse scroll-wheel to zoom in and out.
“I have a cunning plan”
— Baldrick
Finishing the Appalachian Trail in 2012 was a thrill, but what is next? If health is good, yours truly would like to begin a long thru-hike, possibly on the PCT, to celebrate my sixtieth birthday in five years. Until then I want to continue some long hikes, so I turn my attention to the Continental Divide Trail.
I have looked at the CDT before and just shake my head– I simply do not have the technical skills or physical ability for a through-hike of such a challenging trail. But recently it hit me: The CDT runs through four states, similar lengths in each state. Why not do each state in order, one per year? I could start in New Mexico the first year, the state in which I reside, so the logistics would not be too bad. Hiking the first state would give me skills and confidence to try the next state, and so on. Finally, the fourth year in Montana I would be ready to cope with grizzlies, the requirement to reserve campsites in Glacier on specific dates, using an ice axe, and a really really really remote trail far from civilization.
Splitting the trail into four sections also means I will be away from home for less than two months at a time, which is less irritating to Base Support (spousal unit).
So, time to start planning CDT2013! (Or possibly 2014.) I want to use ultra-light gear, but expect to carry several liters of water at times because water sources are scarce and unreliable in southern New Mexico, so my Murmur pack is too small. And the trail is often not well marked compared to the AT, so I need a good solution for navigation. So much to consider. Exciting!
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“I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever… and the more I considered the subject, the bigger the forever loomed. Without knowing how to do it, I began to record some facts around me, and the more I looked the more the panorama unfolded.”
— Frederic Remington
On my recent long hike I took several overlapping photos of certain views to stitch together later into wide-angle pictures using software. Below you can view results of this experiment. In a few locations I was not consciously trying to make a panorama, but there was enough overlap between consecutive shots to stitch together a wider view anyway.
My camera was nothing great, just a low-end Android smart phone with 3.2 megapixel resolution. I first tried the software package Hugin, a free open-source package that runs on Windows or Mac. This video tutorial helped me quickly learn how to use the program effectively.
One problem I notice is that exposure can vary quite a bit depending on angle relative to the sun. My camera was set to automatic exposure, and standard advice for panorama shots is to disable all automatic features. Oops, too late to go back now and re-shoot. And anyway, it is far from obvious how to disable auto or lock current settings on an Android camera app.
Although Hugin has many manual settings that might overcome the exposure settings problem above, I did not find them easy to use. The free Image Composite Editor (link no longer works) from Microsoft seems to handle exposure correction rather well automatically.
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