Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Landscape & Nature Photography => Topic started by: Peter McLennan on January 04, 2004, 03:29:24 pm
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Not sure what you mean by "objects are rotating". With a lens as wide as that, you may be seeing parallax effects with objects close to the lens.
The 15mm virtually guarantees that you'll have the sun in shot unless it's directly overhead. If you use a constant exposure, the area near the sun will be overexposed. What you DON'T want to do is use auto exposure to correct this. The sky tones won't match shot to shot.
Unless you're after a total environment panorama, I suggest a longer lens, especially if you're just starting panos. The longer the lens, the easier it is to create panos. Your fisheye will tax your stitching program to the max.
I shoot most of my panos hand-held with good success, but my lens is only about 35mm at full wide.
regards,
Peter
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Here are a couple more good sites on the topic:
http://www.panoguide.com/ (http://www.panoguide.com/)
http://www.caldwellphotographic.com/Mosaics.html (http://www.caldwellphotographic.com/Mosaics.html)
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I strongly second the suggestion that you start with a longer lens. One absolute requirement is that your tripod be DEAD LEVEL. If not, horizons are screwed up, and the pano software will give you an image that will require alot of cropping to eliminate jagged borders. Also before you do 360's get good at 90's, then 180's to improve your technique. A 360 means that your end image and your start image must overlap very precisely.
Have fun.
Dan
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Shooting overlapping verticals is a good way to get a wider lens out of a digicam. My S-50's lens is not very wide, but two verticals stitched together offer a significant improvement. I get a wider lens and more megapixels, both!
I never use a tripod for this, but I've learned how to keep the horizon perfectly level and to pan nodally. It's surprisingly easy, especially if you can shoot the frames rapidly, before you lose your reference.
Peter
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Using a tripod makes life so much easier for stitched panos - use a bubble on the tripod and the camera hotshoe, both need to be level - overlap by about a third of the image and you will get a good result, particularly if you use MGI Photovista.
Good luck
Ken
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I've had quite a bit of luck using the free panoramatools from http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~dersch/ (http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~dersch/) together with a graphical frontend, such as http://hugin.sourceforge.net (http://hugin.sourceforge.net) for Linux or software from http://www.tawbaware.com/ (http://www.tawbaware.com/) for Windows.
It is quite straightforward to create a large panorama, the largest I've created (handheld) is 50 megapixels, built from 20 5mp images. Working with 50 megapixel images is a bit of a pain with PhotoShop, but I've had more luck using Gimp.. (http://www.gimp.org)
The only problem I've had is with objects too close to the lens, as the difference in angle of the objects gets too large, but otherwise it is often quite simple to make a very impressing image simpy by taking 4 images with a cheap digicam and stitching them together instead of taking a single image with a more expensive (and heavy) dSLR.
Erik
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Hello,
I am looking for a good tutorial/advice on taking panoramics. I have been recently attempting and learning the techniques of panoramas. I use a canon 15m fisheye and have found the nodal point. When I take the panoramics I am seeing that the objects are rotating a few degrees from one picture to the next. How do I solve this problem? Would a good software package solve this? Do I need more overlap in my pictures?
My other problem is that when taking 360 panoramics, unless it is high noon, the sun ends up in my pictures, which is fine, except that it throws a nasty curve into my color. I am a learning photographer. I want to believe that my problem here is just incorrect exposure settings, am I right? or is this problem unfixable.
Thanks for any input,
Uriah
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Peter,
You might find this site to be useful.
http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~bernardk/t.../360/index.html (http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~bernardk/tutorials/360/index.html)
Richard
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I'm in the process of figuring this out myself. I can tell you that with a rectilinear lens, you shouldn't see that. I have only tried once with a fisheye, I'm not very far on the learning curve for that.
I think we need more info about your technique.
Are you using software to defish (straighten the images)? Are you seeing the objects shift after de-warping, or in the original fisheye images?
If you are defishing your images, the software may be the first place to look.
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Average your entire scene to find a good average exposure that you use for all of the photos. My favorite way to take panoramics is to take the photos vertically instead of horizontally with a lens set to between 35 and 50mm to minumize distortion. Have a fair amount of overlap and use a tripod. Good luck.
T
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It is not terribly dificult to handhold three or four shots to stitch into a wide angle, but its near impossible in a 360 panorama, since you have to pivot hte camera around yourself. (search "Jook Lueng" for masterful handheld cubic VR's)
It is not always possible to get decent exposure on all of your frames with one average meter reading. In these cases you need to bracket exposure and use software such as Panotools (open source but didficult to use) which exports layered PSD's. These PSD's are a huge pain to get to match up, but its possible.
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A good book on the subject is "Panoramic Photography" by Joseph Meehan. It has a good discussion of equipment and techniques with many fine examples.
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A bunch of years ago I purchased a Nikon Panoramic head. It has detents for different focal lenth lenses along with a bubble level. I used it for panoramics of construction sites to detail the work done to date.
I pulled it out of the closet (after about 15 years of non-use) and tried it with my F828 - great results.
If you can find one of these - perhaps on eBay - it would help you with your panoramic shots.
Alan