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Written by Nick Kotarski
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Sunday, 03 April 2005 |
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On these pages you will find some panoramas that I have created.
Equipment
Tripod
I use a Manfrotto 190CL
tripod it is well made and reasonably priced. The only thing that I
don't like about it is its weight: 1.8 kg (3.9 lbs). It is fine for
most occasions but is a bit heavy if you need to carry it a long way
from a road.
Head
I use a
Manfrotto 484RC2
head it is robust and has a quick release plate. It doesn't have a bubble level which would have been useful.
Panoramic Head
I currently use a Panosaurus
panoramic head.
The panosaurus is very inexpensive $85.95 plus shipping of $18 to
Europe.
With the US Dollar being weak against the Pound at the moment that
equates to approximately £55 including shipping.
My Canon G2 camera has the mounting hole on the wrong side of the
centre line but the maker can modify the Panosaurus to fit most cameras
at no extra charge.
Software
All of the panorama creation tools that I have looked at are helper
applications for Helmut Dersch's panorama stitching software: Panorama Tools.
This is extremely powerful but rather daunting software and is not very
user friendly. Aparently there is even a part of Panorama Tools for
which source does not exist. Helmut Dersch gave up developing Panorama
Tools some years ago so improvements and bug fixes are made by users.
I started off using PTAssembler created by Max Lyons
but at the time it had an irritating bug which caused it to crash and
lose work. I didn't like having to recreate hours of work so I looked
for another front end to do the job.
I tries Hugin
but although it looked promising and was Open Source, and thus free, it
was really unstable and to my mind unuseable. At the time it
didn't look like thare was much development going on either.
Eventually I settled on PTgui
which wasn't very expensive (49 Euros + VAT) but has always been stable
and fast. The developer is active and there have been several updates
in the past year.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 08 April 2005 )
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Panoramas 
