Which is the best lens for stitching?

[vantomas]

Hi,

i have a job coming up next week and i need to shoot an interior of an old theatre with lots of fine details. the client wants to blow up the picture to about 20x40 ft. i have a done a similiar job a few years back for the same client using 4x5 inch film, then drumscanned. looked perfectly. now another photographer did a test shott with a Ds MkIII and the client wasn't happy. too little detail, etc.

i would prefer to shoot this job on digital, but only have a 5D and a whole lot of primes. which would be the best lens, if i decide to shoot  a few shots and stitch them together to obtain the sharpness i get when using 4x5. i saw some stunning examples of stitched photographs on this forum.

would it be advisable to use the canon 85/1.2 stopped quite a bit and the pan the whole scene, cause this is my sharpest lens?

thanx in advance for any help and advice.

thomas
from germany

www.dashuber.com

[Panopeeper]

There are three criteria regarding the lens, when shooting for pano:

- sharpness from corner to corner

three times :-)

If the lens does not deliver that, the images have to be cropped. Therefor the cropping cameras are inherently better for pano shooting than the full frames.

Another consideration is, that if the vertical angle of view encompasses everything needed, that makes life much easier than if you need several rows.

Anyway, fine details in short distance require fine stitching, incuding fine adjustment of the camera on a dedicated pano bracket (swiweling over the entrance pupil). This may turn out much more tedious than you might think.

[01af]

You don't necessarily need to use your sharpest lens---if nothing but image quality counts then better use your longest lens and shoot a multi-row panorama.

Which a longer lens, you'll need more shots to cover the required field-of-view, you'll get more megapixels and thus, more detail in the final image, and you'll be forced to pan and tilt your camera around the no-parallax point (commonly but falsely called the "nodal point") with higher accuracy.

Setting up your camera so it will pan around the no-parallax point isn't too hard; a simple focusing rail will do if you don't have a dedicated no-parallax panorama tripod head. But tilting around the no-parallax point is pretty difficult, and tedious to achieve without special equipment. So maybe you'll want to use the lens which, in portrait orientation, will cover the required field-of-view vertically so you'll get away with a single-row panorama.

-- Olaf

[ChrisJR]

Have a look at another post I made; http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....ndpost&p=186850 for an example of a theatre panoramic stitch.

This was made with the 2.8 fisheye lens which isn't the sharpest lens by any means but lacks little detail due to the shear amount of images used to create it. It was stitched together using PTGui which is much easier and quicker than stitching in PS.

Generally speak multi-row panoramics will resolve much more detail but they can be extremely time consuming to shoot, especially if the venue or subject is dark.

[sojournerphoto]

One thing to be aware of if you use the longest lens (which is a good suggestion otherwise) is that the depth of field is then limited and you may have a blurred forground or background. Further work could use focus bracketing as well, but that could easily be a 3 week project:)

Mike