Panoramic view of Oudenaarde

Sunday May 11th, and exceptionally sunny and hot weather in this otherwise gray and wet country, what else can a man do with a brand new 40D in his hands? Shoot a few pics and try to stitch them into some panoramic views that make sense. Click on picture above to see what I mean...

The cloud is not yet a slam dunk space for posting panoramic views by non-hackers like myself. My stitching software was able to generate beautiful VR files that I could view with Quicktime but there's no easy way to upload those files to spaces like Blogger... who knows why? Same goes for YouTube, btw. The VRs ended up 'playing' sideways... are you having a laugh? I wish I knew what I've been doing wrong...

Even the shot above has ended with substantially reduced resolution after the Blogger upload. I can understand that... Imagine every cheap blogger like myself uploading MBs upon MBs to the their space for free... this already being a huge burden at Google by requiring gargantuan storage capacity to accomodate the piles of BS people enjoy posting on YouTube...

BTW, I was standing on a bridge above the Schelde river (which sources somewhere in France - I think - and delta-ing in the North Sea via Antwerp), camera body mounted on a tripod with a rotating base subdivided in degrees all the way from 0 to 360 in segments of 10. The panorama above is almost 180 degrees wide and was built from stitching individual pictures taken at 10 degrees sequential rotation (panning right to left) and locked exposure values. With some fiddling to properly overlap the images along their seams I finally assembled this panorama. Some stitching blunder notwithstanding, easily spotted on the yellow-white building on the right... I used a Canon zoom lens (20-135mm with VR) at its normal (per a 24x36mm film standard) focal distance of about 50mm to avoid distortion of vertical and horizontal contours usually caused by wide angle focals, especially visible along their edges.

What do you think? Any good? C'm on..