In our travels, what impresses me about what we see quite often cannot be recorded in a standard aspect ratio (4x3 or even 9x16) photograph.  For example, here is a single photo that I took with my Nikon D5000.

Sure, this gets the basic elements of the scene -- the courtyard, the walkway, stuff in the corner...  But my eye sees a lot more to the right of this scene.  Here is a panorama of the same scene:

I chose this example because it isn't particularly dramatic, yet gets the point of the changed feeling a photo with a wider angle conveys.

Taking these pictures is no longer very hard.  You just have to start thinking and shotting this way when looking at scene.  Here's what I do:

1. Look at the scene.
2. Find the left edge.
3. Take about 3 or 4 images, rotating your body from left to right, shooting pictures close together in time.

When I get home, I use a program named Autopano Pro -- but there are lots of different programs you can use for this.  Here are the features of Autopano I like:

1. Automatic panorama discovery:  You can direct Autopano to look at all of the photos in a directory to find those that make up a panorama.  This works well if use a different directory for each day's photos.  Point Autopano at the photos in a given directory, set it off to discover and stitch, go to bed, wake up in the morning with your panoramas.
   
   
2. If you want, you can also select the photos to be used in the stitching of a wide photo manually.  Sometimes when you have just a few, this is the better way to go.
   
   
3. Autopano doesn't care if your are doing a horizontal stitch, vertical stitch or the more general mosaic stitch where you have moved your camera in both directions.
   
   
4. Finally, if you want to control the stitching settings yourself, you can go as deep into this as you want.  I find that the automated settings serve my purposes.

Finally, I embed a growing collection of such panoramas I have been taking for 10 years as the banner of my blog.  Every time you visit this page, a panorama will be selected at random.

There's a little bit of Walter Mitty in all of us.  Our imaginations are drawn to all sorts of fantastical thoughts, some of which we probably don't want to share in public.

What would it be like to be on the lam for 16 years?  How would you feel if you were bilking your closest friends -- and their closest friends for all of their life savings?  Wouldn't you just once like to push someone around and get your own way even if it wasn't just?  How do you stop a crime that you have to keep committing so that you aren't caught?

Believe me:  I have no sympathy for either of these criminals, but I admit that I find thinking about their lives interesting.  Not particularly proud of that,  I'm not alone.

We had an accident in Phoenix Arizona while on a recent trip to the Southwest.  Fortunately, no one was hurt.  I am now going through the process of making a claim on our insurance policy for collision damage.

At the moment, I have abslutely no reason to believe that my insurance company will be unfair with me, but unfortunately the horror stories about insurance companies screwing people when they go to make claims on their policies are legendary.

I feel that I am at a great disadvantage in this transaction because I will go through this process once or twice in my lifetime, whereas the insurance company has trained specialists whose job is to maximize the margin for their employer.  I have no problem with that.

It seems to me as if it would be beneficial for me to have an advocate representing me who is familiar with all of the ins and outs of insurance claims -- who I could feel was representing my interests in getting the maximum benefit for me from my insurance policy.  I purchased this policy to reduce the risk of such accidents -- not to create yet another stressful situation where I need to interact with someone who is out to maximize the benefit to their company in paying my claim.  Any thoughts?

Time to start another blog.  Someday I will collect all of the posts that I have made to blogs over the last 10 years and put them into one blog... Maybe.