Newsday Thursday: Make a Panoramic View

Thank you David Pogue! If you don't know who David is then you're not keeping up with photo news. I'm a big fan of his column, State of the Art, in the New York Times. Today he talks about a new way to make a panoramic photo and it's free. It's called Photosynth.com and it's from Microsoft. You have to use a Windows PC and either Internet Explorer or Firefox 3 to use it. I'm very intrigued with the possibilities of stepping back into time using old photos that show a scene in sections. Photosynth is similar to the stitching feature in photo editing programs. Several years ago my husband visited the Azores and took a series of images then "stitched" them together to create a panorama. If you want to see a larger version it's posted as the Photo of the Month in my SmugMug gallery. To create a "stitched" photo you need to take incremental shots of a scene then use that feature to pull all the pictures together. This particular view is actually five photos. Using these same five pictures I'm trying to create a Photosynth that I can share on their site. All Photosynth's are public. It was simple to set up an account using my email address and to create a short non-identifying profile. It was even easy to upload my pictures. However...I've been waiting close to an hour for the image to finish publishing. It's possible the site is overwhelmed with users. I'll try again later and if it works I'll let you know.