Gone to See the World. Semester at Sea Spring 2016 Voyage on the MV World Odyssey. Day 14: Crossing the Pacific Ocean From Hawaii to Japan.
I never figured that I would used the Nikon 1 V3 camera to take panoramic images. Especially since I brought it along on the voyage with only one lens, a 70-300 mm VR telephoto zoom. Its sole purpose was a much smaller and lighter weight system for bird and other wildlife photography so I would not need to lug around a much heavier DSLR camera and even heavier 80-400 mm telephoto zoom lens. The down side was the Nikon 1 V3 system has a smaller and more noisy sensor. During the voyage, I perfected a method to use this camera to take panoramic images. I had been using the in camera panorama mode of the Fuji X-T1, but didn’t like the fact that it only took jpg images and stitched them together in the camera. The method I developed with the Nikon 1 V3 camera uses the continuous burst mode (20 frames/second) coupled with a relatively fast shutter speed (1/250 second). I would focus the camera, then holding the shutter button down smoothly rotate until the camera buffer is full. You can tell when the buffer is full when the camera stops sounding like a machine gun and returns to the normal click, click, click. The raw images are then stitched together via software (AutoPano Giga Pro). This sunrise image was created using this technique. It is a composite of 20 images. Click on the image to view a larger version. The full image is 15687 x 3428 pixels (equiv to 52.3″ x 11.4″ if printed at 300 dpi).
Individual images in the slide show can be viewed here.