Baltimore Inner Harbor Meetup

This past Wednesday evening, our meetup.com group assembled once again for a photo shoot at Baltimore's Inner Harbor. We've become quite an active group, as this is our fifth event since we first started in early August. It was a good turnout as well, with 10 photographers along for the fun.

Catch some of the great photos by our members at our group pool on Flickr.com

Also, click on the image above to check out my latest attempt at panoramas, this one stiched together from five photos to produce a 33MP final result, using Canon's PhotoStich software. PhotoStitch comes free with every Canon camera these days, even the least expensive. It's dead simple to use and works great.

This time, I used a tripod to pan for the five exposures, and it worked perfectly. To get this view, we clibed up Federal Hill, an historic site adjacent to the south side of the harbor. My only regret is that these photos were taken a little too long after sunset, and the sky was going black. I'll have to go back to Federal Hill another time to get some "dark-blue-sky" photos of this same scene.

My New 28 Megapixel Superwide Camera...

I don't know why I haven't tried this before... here's a panorama of the Charles River from the Back Bay in Boston.

This 180-degree photo is actually made up of five "normal" images I took with my 18-55mm zoom at it's widest setting. Equivalent to a 28mm lens on a 35mm camera, it's not a superwide by any means. But coupled with the PhotoStitch software that came with my Canon DSLR, I was able to create this panorama in a few minutes. The resulting image was 13,530 x 2142 pixels, or about 28.6 megapixels.

I did this on the spur of the moment last weekend while in Boston for a wedding, without giving it much thought, but here is a good article by Ken Rockwell on using PhotoStitch. Ken notes that even the least expensive Canon digicams made in the last two years, come with this software. The digicams even come with a special "stitch assist" mode to make life easier still.

I see this as a good technique for making some dramatic panoramas in Annapolis and Baltimore. Look for some soon.