underwater panorama

until some hours ago i believed that maybe i made the first ever underwater panorama photograph, while on the philippines. a simple google search proved me wrong, there is already much more impressive work available online (see here, for the first ever published underwater panorama [1]). nonetheless i’m gonna tell you the story of the panorama of my alma jane shot in this post.

while we resurfaced from the alma jane i shot 7 images of the wreck and then tried to reconnect them later on with the excellent hugin for osx. as i mentioned before i started to use makecubic from apple to convert the .tiff-files from hugin to quicktime vr .mov files which are sometimes more pleasant to view.

this particular panorama was the first for me to notice something special:

when i generated the panorama the resulting image was much more pleasing when i added a horizontal guideline along the railing of the ship. this resulted in the image seen on the top left. when i didn’t add that guideline the resulting image was not so pleasing to the eye, mostly because the ship looks really crooked, as seen on the bottom right.

so i uploaded the uncrooked version to flickr, for all of you to see. then i converted the images with makecubic, ’cause i wanted to see how the panoramas look when converted to a quicktime vr. that’s when the difference comes in. the first, uncrooked version looks a bit weird when viewing as a qtvr as you can see in the movie on the left below (760 kb .mov-file).

the second image looks much more like it was in the water, where the movement was a swaying from left to down to right. see for yourself in the movie on the left (769 kb .mov-file).

just so you can see what bonds me to my computer on those long, lazy and rainy sunday afternoons.

have a good week!

[1]: i still might be second :-)

technorati tags: alma jane, diving, hugin, huginosx, panorama, underwater