Morro Rock Panoramic Photo PDF Print E-mail
Written by Daniel Hienzsch   
Sunday, 10 June 2007
Morro Rock is a large volcanic plug, millions of years old, that stands at the northwest corner of Morro Bay on California's central coast.  I visited there during my Morro Bay sport touring ride in 2005 and had a great time.  When Robyn and I visited the rock, I took some time to shoot a bunch of slices for later stitching.  The end result after many hours of computation, are seen below.

Unlike most of the other panoramics in this gallery, I have not included the individual slices that comprise the final graphic. That's strictly because there are 36 of them and I can't really figure out how to display them in the limited screen real estate that I have to play with! 

I had to take the 36 images, all shot on a Canon Powershot A520, and reduce them from 2272 x 1704 to 800x600 in size and reduce the DPI from 150 to 72.  That was done only so that my machine could process the images.  Even with the reduction in resolution and information, it still took well over an hour to process the final composite.  The final full size TIFF file checks in at a whopping  214MB file size and would produce a high resolution printed image 43 x 16 inches in size.  Wow.  And that's after already having reduced the images used to process.  If I used the full images straight from the camera, I'd be printing a billboard!

I think this image is also very illustrative of the software stitching process involved.  Obvoiusly, the original images are all rectangular and it's fascinating to see the way that the software has rotated, blended and skewed the originals to compensate for barrel distortion and perspective.  It also shows what happens when you don't have a tripod to take the original slices... I missed a huge chunk right in the middle!  I guess that means I have to go back to Morro Bay!

Without further ado...

Image

  View Large Panorama (605KB):  Morro Rock

 

Last Updated ( Wednesday, 28 January 2009 )
 

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