New cameras and open source imaging software

So I got a new digital camera yesterday. It’s a Canon PowerShot A550 (review), and I like it a lot.

I went on a walk today and took a whole bunch of pictures of BYU campus, the MTC, and the Provo Temple. On the hill of the Centennial Carillon, I took pictures for a panorama. Since my camera doesn’t have onboard panorama stitching features, and I can’t use the software Canon provides on a linux machine, I went searching for an open source alternative. I found Hugin.

Hugin is a very powerful, compact piece of software. It allows you to select the images you want, put them in order, and hand-pick the control points to use when stitching. The software is intelligent enough to locate corresponding control points on adjacent images when you give it approximate coordinates.

I was very pleased with the results. Here is a copy of the image I created.