I went out for a bike ride around Whitelee Windfarm yesterday for a bit of exercise and to take some snaps.

I always forget something when I leave the house and this time, although I remembered the bike, spare tubes, waterproof, camelbak, helmet and gloves, I forgot to lift my camera. Oops.

I did, however have my iPhone, which is handy enough for taking snaps, but a bit poor in most other respects. In the absence of anything better, it would just have to do.

After a 19 mile jaunt around the wind turbines, down a wee track not shown on the map, up to the National Wind Energy Centre, back down the road to Eaglesham then up the hill to the visitor centre, I also found I'd left my wallet in the house, so couldn't get one of the lovely scones they do in the visitor centre.

During my ride I had taken a few shots of the windfarm, which looked pretty good on the iPhone screen, as usual, but a bit fuzzy when displayed on my monitor.

I'd taken theses four shots -

and wondered what they'd look like stitched together into a panorama.

I'd used a program called Autostitch before (recommended to me by @islayblog) but wasn't too happy with the interface and having to edit the ouput in another package. I did a quick look on google and it came up with Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor) - a free download which does the all the stitching and cropping I needed.

And here's the result -

Not bad for a first attempt, I thought, and a bit more interesting than the four individual shots too.

Next I remembered about Adobe's online version of Photoshop - Photoshop Express - uploaded my panorama and had a play around with the very simplest of settings.

Black and white -

Green hue -

And sepia tint -

I'm really impressed with just how easy to use these imaging tools have been, and am going to pass them on to my art colleagues, who are teaching Higher Photography for the first time this year. The class blog can be found HERE.