The photos shown at the URL were taken by my HP Photosmart camera, an R507, not the Olympus model provided by the school -

http://www.ojlubke.com/pixseries/pixdigitalclass/oysterandcayugapanoramas.html

When I downloaded the pictures from the Oyster Point and Cayuga Park field trips to my computer, the HP software automatically stitched together images with a commonality to form a single panoramic image. The images stitched had been taken in the "panorama mode".

I want to stress to digital photographers the ease with which these panoramas were automatically created. All I had to do was (1) take the pictures with the panorama mode, (2) capture a portion of the previous image in the "next" view, and (3) keep the camera level. Once I started downloading the images from my camera to the computer, the HP software took over! To put it even more clearly, short of shutting it off, there was nothing I could do to stop the computer from creating a panorama!

Once again, the amazing thing about the HP software is that I didn't have to pre-select the images. It detected which photos were taken in panoramic mode and it put together panoramas without asking! It even assigned a suffix "P" to the generated ID number of the first photo in the series and labeled the panorama as such.

When using the Photomerge function of Adobe Photoshop Elements to create a panorama, you must pre-select the images. After that the software takes over completely just like HP. (Note the images do not have to be taken in any particular camera mode --just keep the camera level and capture a part of the previous image in the current image.) I have illustrated the difference between software results in the first two photos on my web page. Using the same images, Photo A1 is HP generated and Photo A2 was created by using Adobe Photoshop Elements. My analysis of the two photos: Although A2 captures a little bit more of the right side of the "pan", it would require some editing to match the quality of the HP auto-generated Photo A1.

One of the panoramas was very interesting in that it detected the sky with a fog layer and matched that part of the image rather than the earth bound objects. See Photo F.

I attempted some vertical panorama shots, but there was more horizontal than vertical in the images selected. The answer is to select appropriate vertical subjects for shooting. Nonetheless, there were some interesting results. See Photos I and J.

Alan Lubke
Student, Digital Photography Class
San Francisco Adult Education
Summer Session 2005

Attachment: My Digital Photography class graduation photo