Photography challenge part 4: photo stitching

Next up in my little photography challenge is photo stitching using the Brenizer method. Essentially you take numerous shots with a shallow depth of field and then stitch them together on photoshop. The result is similar to picture taken with a wide-angle lens. Gina was nice enough to be my model for this photography experiment. Thanks Gina!!

Here's my first Brenizer photo, which I stitched together in photoshop:



And the original, singular photo:



I don't have my own copy of photoshop, so I normally edit my photos in gimp, a free and open-source photo editor. It is pretty powerful, but it definitely can't do as much as photoshop and it doesn't have a built-in photomerge option. Thus, I tried out a free photo stitching software, Hugin. I don't like the way this photo came out and it took a lot longer than doing it in photoshop, but it definitely got the job done and I will probably end up using it again since I am too cheap to buy photoshop, haha. This is my Hugin photo:



And the original, singular photo:



This was definitely more challenging than I thought it would be. For starters, most of the stitched photos came out with what I'm calling "giant legs," with the legs extra long and enlarger compared to the rest of the body. This was because a lot of my pictures of the foreground also included legs, but taken from a different perspective. So when the photo was stitched together it looked funny. I also had a hard time with the sky - taking pictures at sunset meant I wanted the beautiful sky in the background, but the brightness of the sky meant that my pictures were of varying degrees of exposure. Also, having the bright sun in the background gave me some weird results, like this one:


Although to be honest, I kind of like how this one came out. It's like art!