Bernard, what do you mean bay manually? You just stood there and made different exposures, trying to make them overlap by turning your body, without tripod? I must admit, the image looks great! What focal length is it? I Imagine doing multi-row panorams is difficult this way??
And to conclude, is there any image-quality advantage anymore in using a MFDB-system or are you basically saying a D3x, a long lens, a pan-head (good hands) is all one needs today?
Paul,
I used a spherical pano head from really right stuff to capture this image. Capturing a 200 megapixel image like this one with a 20+ megapixel DSLR takes perhaps 2 mins at most.
The result will be perfect if:
1. you locate your lens at its nodal point and use a spherical pano head enabling this (like the RRS I am using)
2. the subject is perfectly static
3. you use a good pano software like PTgui or Autopano pro/giga
If the subject is not perfectly static (wind, people, clouds, water,...) then you need to somehow blend the images smartly to make sure that the movement in the scene does not result in any discontinuity in the final image. Most softwares do this more or less automatically if the characteristic size of the subject is not too large relative to the total image. So it works overall very well for landscapes and large city scapes, but you sometimes have problems with moving foregrounds like grass... this problem will be present with both cyliundrical stitching and flat stitching by the way.
There is little doubt that it will be much easier and relaxing to take a single 60 megapixel image with a H4D60/P65+ compared to doing stitching though. I am not willing to spend that kind of money for a camera and find stitching to be fun for my applications, but I would probably see things differently as a working pro.
More samples here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bernardlangui...57600916381270/Regarding your D3x vs MFDB question, there have been many dicussions around here. The general agreement is that:
- backs have better pixel quality thanks to the lack of AA filter,
- backs have still more DR, but the gap has been reduced significantly with the top DSLRs like the D3x.
Cheers,
Bernard
