Finally I was able to discover one very important parameter which now allows almost flawless panoramic image stitching. I’ve prepared a Japan panoramic image gallery for you.
More to come in the next days.

We are back in Japan. This time for a little less than three weeks and we already enjoyed some days of that long awaited period.

The picture above was shot today when I had some time to play around with the camera while I was waiting for the new haircut of my wife to get completed (about 4 hours). It is a small square with some benches, artistic water installations and some shadow (where I had to hide to protect myself of the burning sun). The place is located between the Imperial Palace (right in the opposite direction from the presented view) and the Tokyo Station (which is behind the big buildings).

As we have internet connection right in the room I already have uploaded some photos of the first days which can be found in the photo gallery Tokyo 2007 album.

Our journey has taken us to many places already: Tokyo Disneyland, Harajuku, Shinjuku, Akihabara, Ueno (where we are staying), Saitama, etc. etc. and there is still some time left. Hooray.
The images in the gallery are just a teaser. Many great shots to follow soon.

Direct access to the panorama gallery. For more technical information read on.

Recently I got excited over panorama images. As my cameras lack fisheye lenses and image stitching software I am using an open source cross-platform solution called hugin. I use hugin as frontend which allows me to use auto pano and pano tools and finally create nice tif images which can be easily used with enblend to create the final stitched image. Then as a last step I use gimp to crop the image and adjust levels, brightness, contrast, etc. At the beginning (as hugin and tools seemed quite troubling and complicated) I used the pandora combine plugin for gimp which worked nicely but as I was looking for more precision I finally figured out how to use the more advanced solution.

To celebrate hugin and tools I created a new page dedicated to panorama views where I will put the newest panorama views from time to time. The gallery uses some JavaScript (tested in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera) to present the images nicely. The raw files of the images can be found here.