How to work some shopping magic with pano pix

One person's English might be the next person's jargon

How's that for some really good trade jargon? “Pano pix.” I'm beginning to get the feel of things around this little digital camera and the panoramic picture production software. I thought it might be both fun for me and perhaps helpful to you to see some progress in the panorama-making stuff.

Sometimes just one trailer might not be enough

My good buddy, Rod, decided that he needed to sell his well-traveled “Casita” travel trailer and buy a bigger one. Now, to me, a bigger travel trailer means bigger trouble and the need for a bigger truck to haul the thing here and there, but Rod explained that he needed more room inside to hold his increasingly large crowd of grandkids. There is a certain logic to that. However, I was not brave enough to give Rod a heart attack by mentioning the increased costs, not only for feeding all of those hungry kids, but paying for a larger trailer, buying a larger truck, renting a larger trailer-storage garage, and paying for all of the additional gasoline it is going to take to ferry the crew here and there around the country. No. I kept my mouth shut about such things, particularly so because Rod is way too heavy for me to pick up from the floor on my own.

Casita's loss becomes the next one's gain

Today, we had to remove some kind of big metal bars from the towing hitch on the Casita unit, the one to be sold. It will be attached to the towing hitch on the new trailer by a trailer hitch specialty company which, remarkably enough, has as its company name, “Master Hitch.” That figures, doesn't it? We grabbed a sandwich at a little sandwich stop, picked up the pieces to be installed on the new trailer and, sort of along the way through those things, we visited the trailer hitch boys to make sure that we and they knew what was underway.

Master Hitch had a master-size show room

They have a fairly large retail store as part of their towing hitch specialty business. Inside the store are displays of all sorts of things that the trailer and the pickup truck set crave. Some of those things were fairly self-revealing as to their purposes, but some were quite mysterious to a non-trailerite like me. Rod probably knows what everything is, but that is because he is a bona fide trailerer. Me? I'm not even a traileree. (I like non-wheeled motel rooms to a greater degree...)

Spinning like a top

So, while I was hanging on in there, waiting for Rod and the trailer experts to talk everything to death, I whipped out my tiny Canon digital camera and used what is left of my body as a bone and protein sort of tripod. That is, I clicked off nine individual shots of the showroom, one after the other, each shot overlapped from the prior shot just a little bit. Around the room I went, but not quite 360 degrees-worth. The final shot to get around full circle would have had me point the camera right at the cashier guy (probably a smart owner-type), and that might have ticked him off and gotten me into trouble with my buddy, Rod. I understand that making the boss (cashier) upset causes prices to increase, and that would make Rod upset and he might whup me good. So, maybe I spun around 280 degrees or a bit more with the camera. No one seemed to notice what I was doing as I snapped one photo after another.

This stuff should be called Easyware - not software

I ran the individual photos through one of the several photo editors I use – this time again it was that friendly “picmonkey” editor. Mainly, the reason for that was to try to equalize the light-dark balances of the group of individual photos. That done, I called up my copy of the Serif “Panorama Plus” (freebie) program and sat back while the program stitched the smaller photos together into one big panorama that showed the whole retail store in one frame. The entire deal was simplicity itself, from mashing down on the Canon camera's exposure button right on through coming up with a happy panoramic photo. Then I used another nifty program, also a freebie, to transfer the images to a CD for presenting to the trailer hitch place as a nice gift and a bribe to do a really good job for Rod on his new trailer.