Surprising features

There is an unusual feature on my new Coolpix compact, it's called "Panorama Assist" scene mode. The idea is that it's supposed to help create stitched panoramas. You select the panorama assist scene mode, then take a picture that will be the left-most picture in the panorama sequence. When you take the next picture, it overlays the right-most edge of the last image on the left of the viewscreen over the new shot. Using this, in theory, you can be more confident that the images can be happily stitched together using panorama software.

I was extremely curious to see how well this would work in practice, and to be honest I wasn't hopeful. Really good panoramas require quite a bit of attention: you need to worry about nodal points, and rotating the camera to remove parallax (or something like that). So in my lunch time I trudged down to the Newbury canal, just off the high-street, to give it a try. I decided to try 5 images covering a 180 degree view of this particular spot.

To be completely honest, the original images came out pretty much as I expected them to. Whilst there was the correct amount of overlap, the rotation and parallax errors that I expected to get were still there. However the overlap was good, so I thought I'd try running it through Photoshop Element's Photomerge Panorama facility and see what it made of it.

Much to my surprise, it seemed to like it. And now, I like it.