Panoramic Photos with GoPro

I enjoy shooting landscape photos, particularly in our U.S. national parks. Sometimes when trying to photograph a wide panoramic view, I simply can’t squeeze the entire landscape into a single photo. That’s when I use a technique where I take multiple side-by-side overlapping images and stitch them together using a software application. A useful tutorial is provided by Digital Photography School.

For most casual photographers, the built-in panoramic setting in mobile phones will suffice, but since I’m a photo geek, I prefer to shoot in RAW, apply color corrections to the individual photos, stitch, rotate, crop, and make other finishing touches. I know it requires a lot more steps, but I like the results and frankly am fascinated by the computations that are involved in the stitching process.

On a recent trip to Maui, I wanted to travel lightly and decided to leave my DSLR at home and shoot only with my iPhone and GoPro. Blasphemy, I know! While hiking in the Summit District of Haleakalā National Park, my iPhone battery died so I began shooting photos and videos with my GoPro HERO7 Black. As expected, I found myself in a scenario where I decided it would be best to take multiple images and later stitch them into a panorama.

Not having previously done this with a GoPro, and recognizing that GoPro cameras have super wide angles and significant barrel distortion, I made sure to overlap each individual photo even more than I usually do with my DSLR. The individual photos are here if you want to play with them:

      
      

Panoramic stitching applications use different methods to combine images, so it is not surprising that I got different results from three photo stitching applications. It is possible that their computational methods are detailed elsewhere, but my main focus is on the end result. Here is a summary of my findings.

Adobe Lightroom Classic CC 2017

Fail. The Panorama Merge feature in Adobe Lightroom was unable to stitch together the GoPro photos.

I got the same result with the other 2 projection options. Granted, this is an older version of Lightroom, and it is possible that the latest version would produce different results. In any case, when it successfully stitches photos, I prefer to use Lightroom for panoramas because it is the focal point of my RAW processing workflow.

PhotoStitcher 1.6

Fail. The application said that there were not enough key points.

I got the same results while trying multiple projection options. Once again, this is an older version, and I have not upgraded to version 2 because I frankly don’t use this application very much.

PTGui Pro 10.0

Winner! This is the application that I used to create the panoramic photo that is pictured at the top of this blog. Here is a screenshot of the unedited preview:

Obviously I haven’t been upgrading my software because version 11 is available at the time of this writing, and I assume that the current version would also successfully stitch the GoPro images.

Conclusion: From this comparison and also from prior experiences, I feel that PTGui is the most powerful stitching tool that I’ve tried. If your only available option is a wide angle lens, and if other applications are unable to create panoramas, try PTGui. However, the old adage that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” definitely applies here—try to shoot panoramas with a lens that has less barrel distortion to begin with. I hope you’ve found this to be helpful.

Mapping the U.S. National Parks

About a decade ago, I thought it would be a fun goal to try to visit all of the national parks in the United States. They are managed by the National Park Service, and currently there are 61 of them. If you also count national monuments, national historic sites, national seashores, and other national park system designations, there are currently a total of 419 units.

Over the years, I've maintained a spreadsheet of the national parks that I've visited. Not only have I periodically documented which one's I've visited, I've also had to make a few recent additions such as Pinnacles NP (established in 2013), Gateway Arch NP (2018), and Indiana Dunes NP (2019). However, a friend suggested that I create a map to visualize my progress, so I created one using Google My Maps:



I plan to update this map over time, but as of today I've visited 31 of 61 U.S. national parks. Not surprisingly, I've been more likely to visit national parks that are closer to home (Los Angeles). In fact, I've visited all of the national parks in California (9), Utah (5), Arizona (3), New Mexico (1), and Oregon (1) which are within striking distance of a 1-week road trip. Since Hawaii is one of our popular vacation destinations, it also made sense to visit its 2 national parks. Because travel logistics to Florida permitted, I've also checked off its 3 national parks.

Visiting the remainder of the U.S. national parks will require some careful planning (and time and money). I'm not only referring to the ones in the continental U.S. Namely, there are some national parks in Alaska that do not have navigable roads (Katmai NP, Lake Clark NP, Kobuk Valley NP, and Gates of the Arctic NP) so will require either chartered flights and/or backpacking trips. Also potentially challenging are American Samoa NP and Virgin Islands NP because of their distance from home, but commercial flights and lodging are available.

It is fitting that I wrote this blog on the 103rd anniversary of the National Park Service which was formed when the Organic Act was signed into law on August 25, 1916.