A View to the West

[Coconuts]

The air has been surprisingly clear lately, with no trace of the Sahara dust. While they are difficult to catch on camera, Vieques and Culebra (45 miles away), and even El Toro in Puerto Rico (65 miles away) could be easily made out by eye today. I used my new Olympus TG-4 tough point and shoot this morning to compose the following six-image panorama from the lower deck at Coconuts. I shot in raw, converted those to TIFFs, aligned them with Panorama Stitcher, and then saved the resulting wide angle shot as a JPG, to stay under VIOL's 1 MB limit. The original TIFF panorama is a whopping 213 MB! For those interested in local geography, I annotated a second image with place names. It's still a very large (5000 pixels wide) image, so click on either image twice to zoom in,and then scroll left and right. Enjoy!

A View to the West

A View to the West, annotated

All the best,

Kevin

[ski2play]

I love the photo with the names on each place! I want to do the same for our house on Jost. I have never used the photo software you speak of, but am a quick learner.

[lprof]

What a fun image! Thank you!

[Wanda Creech]

Very nice. Thanks.Now I need to learn how to do that on my camera.

[inuny]

Kevin,. Nice. Can you come and do it on Mamey Peak? Get the views of the east

Ellen

[Coconuts]

Ellen: Sure; are you on island? Today is a lot hazier than yesterday; not Sahara dust, more like humidity.

All the best,

Kevin

[inuny]

Kevin, I won't be on island til the beginning of December. Great photos

[thompson27502]

I've never used panorama stitcher but have used hugin (http://hugin.sourceforge.net) with great success. It's just about autopilot.

Great pics!

[Coconuts]

Thompson27502: I used hugin successfully a few years ago for a sunset panorama, but for some reason it was having real trouble with my shots the other day, requiring me to add control points to tie the images together. I went to the trouble to do this, but then things then got geekier and really complicated, so after a few tries (same outcome), I went looking for alternatives. My TG-4 camera has a built-in panorama mode, but it is limited to only three images. I found Panorama Stitcher for the Mac (www.boltnev.com/panoramastitcher), which wasn't free, but one of review's comments was that the user found it so much easier to use than hugin. At $15, it was a lot less than some packages, and very simple to use (plus, it worked).

All the best,

Kevin

[shoemak38]

[mindehankins]

Love these shots - especially the one that was labelled! I know there's an phone app that you can point into the sky and it'll tell you what you're looking at. There's probably a market for an app that would do that for islands in the distance on STJ....hint hint

[Bigcheeze]

Nothing beats a view from Coconuts