Little do they know...

Cathy Franklin made photos in Paradise Valley overlooking Mummy and Camelback mountains.
Photos originally posted on azcentral.com

I love it when a reporter or a reader unintentionally makes images that overlap and allow creation of a panorama.

On Tuesday evening, residents of central Arizona watched as a massive wall of dust rolled into the Phoenix metropolitan area. azcentral.com, the website for the Arizona Republic and KPNX-TV posted over 200 reader images.

As I was browsing the images, I realized several of them could make panoramas. Since I haven't done much stitching of late, I used this as an opportunity to practice with PTGui. The finished images are here:  http://garyobrien.com/2011/haboobpanos/

Process:
1) screen grab of images from site (photo gallery is in Flash).
2) crop screen grabs at exactly the same size.  I wrote a PS4 action for this.
3) Convert screen grabs to .tif format.
4) Stitch .tif files in PTGui.

As picture editors and multimedia producers, if we can add value to images, we certainly should. This is a fun way to do just that.

Ideally, the full resolution images submitted by the readers would be used for these. With a couple of these readers, I would have contacted them and asked for more images from the same location. I would be willing to bet they have images that work well that they didn't submit.