I was up on Mount Seymour hoping to get some nice snow photos, but the weather never cleared up as promised. As I was about to give up, I noticed a bright spot between the trees. Although the sky over my head was gray, westward the sun was finally showing its face.

It lit up a mountain close by nicely, but I couldn’t get the shot.

Trees were in my way, and there was no way to either get higher or in front of the trees. So I turned to leave thinking what a waste of a day. As I walked down the mountain, I kept my eye on the mountain and noticed I can clearly see the either mountain as I was walking. I thought to myself, “If only my camera can capture what I just saw, I’d have a great shot.” Then I realized, it can.

I just need to take pictures from different positions to see different parts of the mountain (ie. abusing perspective). Finally, stitch the images together. The most common use of stitching is to create panoramas, but this is a little different. I will be stitching images together to “virtually” remove the trees.

Here are the original images, as you can see each section of the mountain is guarded by trees.

From those images, I erased the trees.

Then into your favorite stitching program, and out pops this (after some cleaning up).

I’ve never seen this technique used before (not that I believe I am the first to use it either), but this shows how you must remember tools are versatile. Don’t limit your thinking that stitching is only for panoramas.