Friday, November 30, 2007

Panoramic of Kabul


Panoramic of Kabul
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

This is hands down the largest panoramic photo I have ever taken, it consists of over 60 separate photos stitched together (ok, so I have seen gigapixel panos but for me this is big) and the original .psb file was over 600megs, my little laptop just about choked on it. To get under the flickr 10meg requirement I shrank the photo to about 1/3rd of its original size (the original is a bit over 50,000 pixels wide), converted it to jpeg, and used a quality setting of ~70… whew. But hey, I got just about exactly what I wanted, the mountains with the homes built on them. In Kabul what I think of the most is these homes that are built on the sides of the mountains, apparently where Kabul’s poorer citizens live. I had tried to take a photo to capture what I see before but it just didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I had some Afghan’s in my organization ask the construction crew working on a 5 story tall building not far from my office and they said sure so I went armed with my dinky little SD700 IS cannon camera a tripod and spent like 10 minutes taking pictures for this panoramic.