Create your own panorama

Eliotites are welcome to create their own panoramas of places around the house and submit them to the webmaster for inclusion on the website.
The software is very user-friendly and very good at blending images. You should expect to spend less than one hour to have your panorama ready.
Panoramas do not need to cover the entire space: you can take a few overlapping pictures and they can be made into a partial panorama.

How you take the photos

• You don't need a very fancy camera to take the photos, but ideally you should to be able to set focus and exposure to manual.
  If you can't set focus and exposure to manual, then focus your camera on the same spot before each picture by pressing your shutter half-way, and then turn around to reframe your picture, and then press the shutter completely. Keep in mind that if you take photos outside it's better if it's not cloudy, because the clouds can move and change the lighting between your pictures.
• Aim for at least 30 degrees overlap between each two photos. Overlap as much as half of the image if your lens has large distortion or if you are unsure of how much you are overlapping. You could need 10 pictures or more if you go around 360 in a wide space like the courtyard.
• As you turn and pan sideways, try to take each photo at the same height; use a tripod and lock it in if you can get one. Then, you can tilt your camera up or down and go around panning again.

How you stitch them together

• Download and install Hugin, by going to: http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ It works on all operating systems.
• Refer to this website for more more comprehensive tutorials.
• Open Hugin, and follow the instructions here: http://hugin.sourceforge.net/tutorials/multi-row/en.shtml
• After the Alignment of the images, Go to the Stitcher tab and
  -Select Equirectangular for projection
  -Click on "Calculate Field of View" and "Calculate Optimal Size"
  -Correct the Panorama Canvas width to something under 10000, or to something under 3000 even, if all you need is a preview.
  -Choose JPEG and quality 100 for output and email the resulting file to webmaster at eliot.harvard.edu
  -If you want the panorama for your own site or blog, use something like PanoCube (Windows) or CubicConverter (MAC) to make it into a Quicktime movie that lets people view your panorama interactively.