How to create a panoramic image of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco
Golden Gate Bridge Panorama
I was up in the Marin headlands recently on a very clear day and was stunned by the view of San Francisco and the Golden Gate bridge. Equipped only with a lame Canon SD 300 digital camera which wasn’t quite up to the task of fully capturing the view I had, I decided to try and take multiple snapshots covering parts of the view and stitch them together as a panorama. This is the result of my work and a description of the methodology I used.
Methodology
I zoomed into the maximum optical zoom allowed by my camera – 3x – and then found a place where I could pivot a few degrees at a time to capture portions of the panorama I desired. Then beginning with the leftmost frame I desired, I gradually took individual pictures ensuring that the current one I was taking always overlapped with the prior one.
Thereafter, I went home and downloaded Hugin, a piece of software designed specifically for this task. After about an hour of playing around with it to determine its functionality, I set about creating my panorama. First, I laid out my images sequentially from left to right within Hugin. Second, taking two images at a time I set about finding common points on each pair of images. I picked 5-6 common points for each pair of images. Finally, I asked Hugin to create a panorama based on that information.
The result, due to human error in the panning process, was not a perfect rectangle. So, I used Gimp for some post processing to ensure that I had a nice rectangular image.
Tools Used
- Hugin (the OSX version)
- Gimp (the OSX version)
- Cannon Powershot SD 300 Digital ELPH Camera
- Apple Macbook
In addition to the view from Crissy Field, I think this is one of the two best sites from which to admire the Golden Gate bridge. So, be sure to seek it out if you’re ever in the San Francisco area.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically each day to your feed reader. If you don't have a feed reader, you can always have these articles delivered to your email inbox every day. Click here to sign up.
