Abandonded mobile home, Londonderry

This morning I took this photo of a vacant mobile home near where I live. Not a “pretty” picture, to be sure, but I think it has some connotations that are relevant.

Tech notes

The image is a composite of three Canon G9 exposures, and the resolution of the resulting image is about 6000×4000 pixels. (Click on the above image to view a slightly larger, 720×480 pixel version.)

I’ve been experimenting with stitching images together. While I’ve made a few 180° panoramas that I find interesting, I find it difficult to get really excited about pano’s. They have their place, such as for web page headers (see above), or spreads in newspapers, magazines and books. But panoramas typically have distinctive distortions, and it’s a little more challenging to display them as fine art prints. Plus, they can take a long time to render and can consume vast quantities of disk space.

Less extreme panoramas are a little more interesting, though. They let me create higher resolution images that can have a normal aspect ratio — 3:2, 4:3, 5:4, or 1:1 — and they can be printed significantly larger without having to upsize (and degrade) the image. Probably the main appeal, though, is that I don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on new, high-resolution camera equipment! Yes, I’m cheap.

The downside? More disk space is required to combine images. And it takes some time to stitch them together. Plus, I find that to get optimum results, especially with small-sensor cameras, you have to be very careful with respect to camera technique — sturdy tripod, properly adjusted & leveled pano head, consistent focus and exposure, and RAW capture. I also find that I spend more time processing small-sensor images to remove noise, minimize chromatic aberration and fine-tune the sharpening