The stitched panoramic
I have published this stitched panoramic on the web previously but decided to rework it and try out some new ideas (new to me at least). The stitched panoramic was compiled from a total of 11 frames taken handheld, a tripod in the circumstances was impractical. Handholding inevitably led to a bit of stepping. I was aware of the potential for this to happen at the time and so was as careful as possible to keep the camera, and the resulting frames, as close to level as I could. In the end, I chose not to fight the stepping but instead use it as a feature. I tried to achieve the look of a battered photograph and hence avoided cropping the image to clean straight edges.
Using layers and textures in Photoshop
The background olde time map of South Africa is courtesy of: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/SouthAfrica1885.jpg The map was at least in part colour and clear, not what I wanted for this exercise and so I did some Photoshop work to “age” it. 🙂 A black and white adjustment layer was used and then a sepia photo filter was applied. A grungy texture file courtesy of Flickr was overlaid on the map and finally, some dirty colour botches were randomly painted over at low opacity on a separate layer.
I took to the edges of the pano photograph with a rough deckle effect brush to blend in some of the textured map.
I guess this exercise says something about going back periodically and looking over your old images, revisiting them if you like. The original pano had been sitting on my hard drive for about 4 or 5 years. When I first processed this stitched pano, this approach hadn’t occurred to me. ~KD
