I’m working on getting the Slovakia pics into my album this morning; by the time you read this they should be there. Up by the castle I took a dozen pictures to stitch together into a panorama. fuego’s camera has a cool feature that shows the last picture on the screen offset by a certain amount to help you line up the next shot. My digicam has no such feature, so I just took a whole bunch of overlapping pics with the horizon in about the same place.

“Time to learn PhotoStitch”, I told myself this morning. PhotoStitch is the program that came with my big camera for turning lots of little images into one big one. I anticipated a process in which I told the software which points matched up on adjacent photographs. It would take a while, but what can you do?

I was wrong. I arranged the photos in sequence and hit the merge button and it just… did it. Here’s the result:

As you can see, one section is a little dark, but that’s a quibble and is easily fixed. The slices were by no means of equal size, yet the software knew how to line things up. I watched as it added the slices, completely amazed. You can’t tell from this tiny version, but along the seams everything is still very sharp. Incredible.

As for the picture itself, it is about 180° taken in twelve shots. The river is the famous Danube, and on the other side are endless gray housing blocks made from pre-fab concrete. On the near side are the old church towers and red tile roofs from pre-Soviet times. A (somewhat) larger version of this pic can be found over in the Slovakia section of my photo gallery.