When I was in Padstow Harbour the other day I was thinking it was the ideal situation for cylinder pano... a semi-circularish row of old stone buildings round the harbour...
But I would have to eliminate the masts and rigging of boats in the foreground... taking alternative shots from different positions (with a 10m Manfrotto Agnoskope) to mask out the unwanted foreground rigging... is there a quick and easy way to do this?
Quick and easy, depends on the situation at hand but probably not. One approach you can try is stitching TIFFs with alpha masking (make the background layer into a normal layer and delete features into transparency), as long as the individual tiles have the disturbing features at a different position relative to the background/plane surface. The blending engine will disregard the alpha areas, and use the rest to blend the overlap. This even works in Photoshop.
This is not "flat plane stitching"... ¿but I could do flat plane stitches of individual buildings and then cylinder stitch from those pix?
While a bit convoluted, yes it would allow to get rid of distracting foreground detail in the flat plane, but there will be parallax in e.g. street surface structure (brick, curbstones?). The cylindrical projection stitch however will still create distortion of horizontal lines that are not on the horizon.
That day I spoke to gallery owners, and one (not in Padstow itself) said that photographs were "just what was in front of the photographer when they push the button"
Well, if the amount of effort needed doesn't show in the image, I can understand some of their ignorance, but then it's up to the photographer to demonstrate the differences between a straight photograph out of the camera and the resulting work of art.
Cheers,
Bart
