Billion-Pixel Panorama's

[Brian Emfinger]

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3938717.ece

It says this device may only cost a few hundred dollars. It would be a bit difficult to use this in a storm chasing sense if you were going to do the entire panorama as it says that can take 10 minutes but if there was a way to sample a smaller area then it could work for most severe weather.

Also, on a completely different note:

I saw this dandy storm chase tool online a few days ago...its basically a souped up/bigger Garmin GPSMAP 376c. There isn't likely to be many of us who can afford it though!

The Garmin GPSMAP 5012

 

[James Langford]

I like how they kind of slam those of us who have been shooting panos and stitching for years. ha ha.

"much as amateurs have attempted to do for years by after taking several pictures of a wide landscape"

While it would be cool to have the camera do the rotating and such for me, it is relatively easy to accomplish the same effects yourself by using a decent tripod and a camera with manual mode. I use Panorama Factory, and it does a great job of stitching multirow panos. You can also try PTGui, as it is supposed to be even better. I also kind of question that they will sell the camera for a few $100 dollars, but I guess we will see.

EDIT: One other thing I realized when looking back at the article. They mention that it took over 10 minutes to capture the scene of the Golden Gate. IMO, that will cause lots of problems for most panoramic images. So many things move/change in a short time, most importantly the sky. You can see that in their golden gate shot, as the sky is different intensities in different areas. Software can correct that somewhat, but not well IMO. Here's a scene that I shot. I took 6 shots oriented vertically over about 20 seconds:

Even during the 20 seconds, things were moving a lot.

James

 

[Brandon Goforth]

Stitching photos together is no big deal, as you said James, just set your exposure and focus, then flip to manual and take 1 shot, pan over and take another, it's no big deal. If you have Photoshop, there is a tool called Photomerge that does a brilliant job of combining and blending images and I promise you can't tell the difference. Just a couple of weeks ago, I took some landscape shots in the Wichita Mountains in SW OK (@17mm) and stitched 4 images together! It looked amazing to say the least. With storms and moving clouds, as long as you take the shots within a few seconds of each other you should be just fine, but you have to make sure you keep the exposure the same with each shot.