stitch up

just when you think you couldn’t waste any more of your own time, you take a look back through your thousands of unused digital photos and come across at least 17 batches of shots that you thought one day you would turn into an exciting panorama, spending far too long with a photoshop file with 229 layers and a lifetime of airbrushing layer masks so that that tree on the right has branches that actually join together somehow. so how serendipitous that I should have come across a folder with not one, but two sets of photos that somehow I thought I could combine in an oh-so-clever way and travel back in time or something. I knew there was a photomerge in creative suite 3, I just hadn’t had time to play with it.

17 hours land 5 different attempts later and a number of lengthy intervals while I foolishly thought I might just rotate my 1.2GB photoshop image 1 degree counter clockwise, and I have a mashed up panorama. its not very good. I mean, when photomerge stitches everything together, it looks pretty nice and I thought it was very clever, but it was just a bit annoying. it didn’t do it exactly how I wanted it, and really it had a thankless task, as my camera is pretty bad and I’d deliberately left out a few connecting frames, just to see what would happen, so that I ended up trying to make perspective views of multiple perspective views which resulted in the centre of the image being about 1 pixel high and the edges about 10000, but you get the hang of it eventually – just get everything right first time.

I’m still working on the most enormous version of a flattened all-round view of the most monstrous building in norwich and I’ll continue to do that by hand, filling in the gaps with ford fiestas that miraculously appear from the car park next door or carefully aligned bushes to cover my mistakes. of which there are many. but its not like anyone looks at it anyway.