Such a project is always a bit uncertain, as it’s challenging to know when and under what conditions you’ll have the opportunity to go up, but in the end, it was completed.

This obsession began in 2013. It started with the four seasons and then evolved into the 12-month panorama projects. In the past, I didn’t know how to align the images beautifully to make them as accurate as possible. Last year or the year before, I figured it out, so you can expect some of the older photos to be posted as well. But for now, this is what was completed.

These photos were taken from January 2016 to December 2016, one each month. I tried to go around the same time of day to keep the conditions similar and to show the changes of the city and the nature. The choice of location was influenced by the demolition of the Magasház. One time, maybe in May, I also took a gigapano from this spot, which I had uploaded earlier.

The process involved setting up the tripod in January at a location with reference points to ensure that I could return to the exact same spot later. I took multiple shots of the tripod from different angles, including its legs, head, and central column, after leveling it. I then selected a control point in the city and a focus point in the viewfinder. I took a reference photo and subsequently reloaded this photo onto the memory card each time I returned to the spot and took new photos. When the two images matched, I knew the camera was in the correct position and height. From this point, I needed end points: one where I started taking the pictures and another where I finished. Each panorama was made in two rows. This was the least controllable part of the setup, aside from the weather, of course. The overlap between photos was about one-third, which I maintained by feel. There was no time for fiddling, as even a few clouds could visibly shift shadows in less than half a minute.

After the base images were completed, I processed them in Lightroom and then stitched them together in Photoshop. At this stage, there were 12 panorama images that were roughly similar, but when stacked, they were misaligned. The solution in Photoshop was the “Puppet Warp” function. I selected a base image and aligned the others to it. Puppet Warp creates a mesh of triangles on the selected layer. Pins can be placed at the vertices of these triangles. These pins anchor specific points, and if a pin is moved, the corresponding point on the layer moves with it. The top layer being aligned was always set to 50-70% opacity to see the base image and adjust accordingly. This method corrects discrepancies from stitching the panorama images, aligning different layers, in this case, images taken in different months. From then on, it was just a matter of time, patience, and hardware. The final result is always in question as it depends on how the pieces look together. This is what came out this year.

The i7 processor and 16GB RAM handled the task well. The 2.5-gigapixel images arranged side by side and one below the other on the gigapan site take up 31.5GB in PSB 🙂 You can find it here:

http://gigapan.com/gigapans/194760

The process of demolishing the Magasház and the changes in the cityscape are not so apparent here, so I edited the images into two versions for this purpose: