There is a definite magic associated with panoramic images that capture the entire scene that the eye can see (and often more). Sadly taking panoramic photos is out of reach for most individuals as it requires expensive panoramic photography equipment. However, anyone who has a fairly recent version of Photoshop Elements or Photoshop CS upwards can also accomplish panoramic photography. Read on to see how!

To achieve panoramas you must take several photographs which have a region overlapping. The other key point to producing good panoramas is to keep the cameras position still and rotate it around its axis. Do not rotate yourself with the camera in your hands, rotate the camera.

Also, if possible you will want to turn the camera off automatic shoot-mode. To do this on a standard digital camera go on to manual focus, exposure, aperture and shutter speed. This will ensure that all photos will appear consistent, e.g. they will all be a consistent brightness.

Once you have the photographs and are back at your computer load up photoshop and go to file - automate - photomerge. What happens next varies depending on your version of photoshop, sometimes it brings up a screen where you can manually adjust the photo positions. If this is the case arrange them so they all match up as best as you can (how difficult this is varies depending on how well you shot the images).

Inevitably this process doesn’t create a rectangular result due to the photos being skewed, repositioned and distorted. You can leave the final image like this or crop it so it’s rectangular.

Note: Don’t restrict yourself to horizontal panoramas, sometimes it’s fun to have tall and thin images too. Here are some more panoramic photos I took whilst travelling around Europe. If you wish to use these images anywhere then please email me and request permission (they are copyrighted along with everything else on the site).

The new website is launched and hopefully fully functional. I’ll detail the entire process including the WordPress plug-ins used, for you bloggers out there. We would really appreciate some feedback on the design so please leave them in the comments.

This is my first WordPress theme design and it took a bit of getting used to - as I’m used to starting the design of web pages from scratch. Digging around in someone else’s code is infuriating and satisfying, in equal measures. I’ve definitely learnt plenty of things about the systems used to display blogs, which will be invaluable for designing clients’ blogs in the future.

For anyone who uses WordPress we used the following plugins for this blog:

Author Image(s) by Scott Reilly

Tiger Style Administration by Steve Smith

The second one is a visual alteration to the WordPress backend and doesn’t effect what you’re seeing at all.

Anyway, posts will be a little thin for a while as I continue to setup the rest of the site.

3 weeks ago I jumped ship from being a long term Windows user to using Mac.  I’d only ever used Macs very briefly, accounting for less than an hour of overall use.

So what was the reason for my switch I hear you asking?

Short answer:

I was fed up of the unreliability of xp and the constant need to format.

Long answer:

1. My Dell Laptop kept crashing and running generally slowly.  As it happens this probably wasn’t entirely xp’s fault as I believe there was a hard drive fault.  However, even before this I had to format every three months or so which really infuriated me.
2. XP was very unexciting and made things which should be fun feel like a chore
3. Viruses and spyware were really irritating - I know you should be careful, not go on those kind of websites etc. but that is sometimes unavoidable!
4. OS X seemed so fresh and fun

I decided to buy a 17″ Macbook Pro which was pretty expensive but I felt worth the money.  Incidentally, I believe this to still be true now.  I was very nervous about forking out that volume of money on something I hadn’t had an enormous amount of experience on (os x).  I can say, hand on heart, that I don’t regret a penny of the purchase as it’s far and away exceeded my expectations.

The process of switching isn’t entirely painless though, I found pretty difficult.  The main thing, which I still struggle with, is the keyboard layout.  I am incredibly used to the UK PC keyboard layout, more specifically my old laptop’s which had quirks of its own.  This may seem like an easy thing to convert to, compared with the totally different ways the operating systems manage programs etc. However, if you use a lot of shortcut keys, which I do, changing these is really difficult. Particularly if they’re in a program which you used to use on a PC, such as Photoshop. Photoshop to me is something which I’ve gotten so used to that I don’t think about what I’m clicking or doing, it just happens. It tends to be a blur of keyboard presses and then something has happened (something which my decrepid old laptop struggled with in it’s dying days).  Photoshop has caused me quite a lot of pain in the transfer but now I have the knack of most of the shortcuts I’m getting on with it better than I ever did on PC.

I shall report back later on with some more comments on my transition and hopefully soon with some designs produced on my shiny new machine!