Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board Whitney Summit panorama 9-11

I took this (my only shot) from the summit at 11:30 AM. Since Telescope Peak is just barely visible I'd say there was a 70 mile visibility radius.

http://www.liquidman.com/Mt_Whitney/index.html

Liquid

Thanks for a great pic. I forwarded it to my 80 year old Dad who loves the Sierras.

What a great shot! How did you do that? What type of camera?

Great picture...I can almost taste the gu and potable aqua pills! Thanks.

You can put together a panoramic shot by taking 5-10 pictures on a tripod(so that you have to crop out as little as possible in the future) and then dumping them into a program called autostitch. A simple google search can locate this small, free utility. There are other, much more time-consuming ways of putting together panoramics, but I haven't found them to be any better than autostitch. Did I mention it is also fast and free?

-Noah

I topped out on the summit at 11:30am on 9-11, I must be in the hut at the time you took this panorama, but I'm up there!

That sure is purty.

Thanks, Noah! I'll look for the program online for my upcoming trip to Yosemite/Death Valley/Zion. I'm sure I can get some fun panoramas up there!
-Laura

Well it's nice to see that the 'stitch' debate still rages in even the most remote corners of civilization.

I used a Nikon 8700 8.1 mp camera, it has a 'mode' that will overlap a third of the last image taken so you can re-align the next exposure. I then used a program by Ulead to put them together. Autostitch does the best job I have seen but Ulead has definite advantages, the most being the final image area per frames taken is far greater (although less accurate). Plus Ulead won't crash when the final image exceeds 8000 pixels, in fact I've done some in excess of 20,000 without any problem.

I put the image into Photoshop and had to fix the problems Ulead created so I ended up with a file that's about 300 megs when saved (probably required 1.5 gigs of ram just to play with in PS).

I've had several requests for the high rez so I put it on my website, there's now a link to it on the page listed above

If you want to play "Name that peak" here's a couple of links:

http://www.viewfinderpanoramas.org/panoramas/AME/Whitney-S.gif

http://www.viewfinderpanoramas.org/panoramas/AME/Whitney-N.gif

I find it amazing that the computer generated and photographic are identical.

mchiker, I was in the shack before and after this shot was taken, we must have met. What do you think the wind speed / temp was up there?

Thanks for all the responses

liquid.

For help identifying the peaks in view check this thread:

<a href="http://www.whitneyportalstore.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=004765">Whitney's 100 Peaks to See</a>

For part of the view with some of the peaks labeled:
http://dbdimages.smugmug.com/gallery/1622676/2/84434955/Large

Dale B. Dalrymple
http://dbdimages.com

Wow Dale, great panos on your site. Some look like they're actual 'film' scanned.

Great picture. For future readers, I also posted a cross reference to this thread on the BIG MOUNTAIN PANORAMA thread.

It was freezing up there, much colder than I expected it to be. I had all the cold-weather gear I owned on, not so much because of temperature, but because of wind. I'd say the temp was probably around 40.

I'm not a pro at estimating wind speed, but I wouldn't be surprised if the windspeed on the summit that day was 35-45 mph. I couldn't have my gloves off for more than a few seconds without them getting numb. Summit photos were tough, and everything in me wanted to just sit in the hut and get out of the wind!

If you are interested in learning more about photostitching, I suggest you visit Erik Goetz's website; VirtualParks.org. IMHO, he has the best panoramas of the Sierra I have found. The specific page that he discusses the stitching process is:

<a href="http://www.virtualparks.org/html/making-panos.html">Photostitching</a>

For another approach, look into <a href="http://www.ptgui.com">PTGui</a> and the Panorama Tools suite. Panorama Tools is free, but the GUI front end isn't. (It's reasonable, though.)

These will work for simple linear panoramas, circular pans or full spherical VR pans. I started shooting VR pans with my old Nikon 990 and FC-E8 fisheye adaptor, which is what I used for my <a href="http://www.mtritter.org/batting.500/panoramas/summit.html">Mt. Whitney</a> pan back in 2001.

Since then, I've moved up to a D200 and the new 10.5mm full-frame fisheye, so the pans are a lot sharper (and bigger), like the one I shot on the top of <a href="http://www.mtritter.org/Mauna_Kea/Pans/Mauna_Kea_Pan.html">Mauna Kea</a> last summer. (Yeah, I still need to paste something into the bottom of that one...)

It is also worthwhile to compare what is achievable using various panorama viewers. I shot this pan of the upper <a href="http://www.mtritter.org/Meramec/">Meramec River</a> near my home in MO. The regular pan is displayed with the PTViewer Java applet but there is also a <a href="http://www.mtritter.org/Meramec/Meramec.mov">Quicktime VR</a> version if you have the patience to load a large (3-meg) file.

If you look in the sky between the trees at the far end of the dam, there is a hawk thermaling. In the PTViewer Java version, he's just a dot but you can definitely identify him as a hawk in the QTVR version. Nice lens, that 10.5 fisheye!

One thing I'd point out is that with any camera/lens, you want to have some sort of mounting bracket that centers the "nodal point" of the lens over your pivot point (usually, my hiking staff/monopod). The tripod socket is never going to be at the optimal location and the offset will give you parallax errors that create headaches at the stitches between adjacent frames in the pan.

Finally, for best results, you need to be able to put the camera into an "exposure lock" and "white balance lock" mode so the brightness and colors are consistent between frames. I learned that the hard way when I first started shooting linear pans with my film camera. It is really obvious when you have a nice blue sky that changes suddenly between frames!

For more examples, check out the "Panoramas" pulldown on my <a href="http://www.mtritter.org">WWW page</a>.

Fantastic panorama !
Thank you for sharing this with us.