tomputer

In May this year I enrolled in a photography course at the Open University. I’ve been interested in photography for a while (I’m on my fifth digital camera in not many more years) but it was when I bought a Canon EOS 400d digital SLR a year ago that my interest became more serious. I had a look at the local college and looked into a couple of one or two day courses offered by local photographers but settled on the Open University’s Digital photography: creating and sharing better images (course code: T189) as being the best value and most comprehensive. It’s a ten week course (run twice a year in May and October) and the focus is a roughly 50:50 split between in camera techniques and the so-called “digital darkroom” of image manipulation on the computer. This may not suit everyone as some believe that a photograph should be taken correctly in the first place and any post-processing is “cheating” but it suited me just fine.  The course is worth 10 Open University points (most OU qualifications are multiples of 20 points) but I intended to do the course to improve my photography rather than to work toward a recognised qualification.

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Here’s a recommendation for a piece of softare I’ve been using for a couple of years. Autostitch is a fantastic piece of software for creating panoramic images and the results are nothing short of amazing. I’ve tried several photo-stitching applications in the past: some require lots of manual intervention to approximately align the photos in the correct order, others produce distorted or blurry images. Autostitch has none of these problems, just import a bunch of pictures and it works out which of them are part of the same scene (it will exclude any that don’t fit but it’s quicker if you only select the images you want to join together), it works out which images need to go where, and it then creates a single panoramic image. Another great feature is that it can create 2-dimensional panoramas - most other applications only create 1D panoramas so the camera has to be panned in the x- or y-axis but not both. This is great for creating an image where you can’t get a wide enough shot to include the whole scene -for example when photographing a building on a narrow road where can’t position the camera far enough away to fit it all in. Oh, and did I mention that autostitch is free?

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