What is panorama picture? According to Wikipedia:

Panoramic photography is a format of photography that aims to create images with exceptionally wide fields of view, but has also come to refer to any photograph that is cropped to a relatively wide aspect ratio.

Normally, professional photographers create a panorama picture using a special camera, called rotating panoramic camera. Nowadays, we are able to create software. It is also called photos stitching. The idea is to “stitch” or combine several pictures taken from a standard camera using a special interpolation algorithm.

The picture below shows an example of panorama picture. The pictures were taken from Nokia N95 and stitched using Canon Photo Stitch. It’s not perfect yet since I’m an expert yet. :)

Creating panorama picture

What do you need to create panorama picture? The first thing is, of course, several sequencing pictures. After that, you need software to “stitch” your pictures. There are several available applications that will do the job, e.g.:

  • ArcSoft Panorama Maker ($39.99). This software is very easy to use; unfortunately it doesn’t come for free. There is a 14-day trial version.
  • hugin (open source). It is an open source project for panorama application. The hugin community has created nice tutorials as well.
  • Canon Photo Stitch. This is the one that I used to create the picture above. Unfortunately, the software is only bundled with Canon digital camera.
  • … many other applications.

Tip: For best result, a picture must have at least 25% overlap with its neighbors.