I was just wondering if anyone has used multiple cameras of the same make and with the same lens to do stitching with?
The idea being that rather than take one camera and move it n times to capture the areas you want, use several cameras together that each activate their shutter at almost the same time, making it easier to deal with movement, etc. Yes, this is a more expensive way to do this but... I was just curious
Hi,
This will inevitably (unless semi-transparent mirrors are involved) result in potential parallax issues, because the entrance pupils of the different lenses are at different perspective points. Some subjects can tolerate some parallax because their foreground (or background) is not that critical that it would be impossible to hide the errors when blending the overlap zone of the images.
For moving subjects it's the only way (although synchronizing the moment of capture becomes a challenge), so care has to be taken in the choice of foreground (or background), if possible. When constructing a rig with multiple cameras, it helps if the entrance pupils of the different lenses are positioned as close together as feasible (e.g. by crossing the direction of the optical axes i.e. left camera shoots image at the right and right camera the image at the left, and/or positioning high-end DSLRs with their pentaprisms next to each other instead of their battery compartments).
Strictly speaking, for stitching purposes the cameras don't have to be of identical make and model and even the focal lengths can differ, as long as the stitcher software cope with images having different focal lengths.
Cheers,
Bart