Please feel free to post any of your panos, or pano experiences. Any pano is essentially "Alt" no matter what gear you are using!
I've been having some very rewarding images with hand held panoramas, especially the recent use of the Zeiss Contax 50/1.4 lens on my 1Ds2.
This lead me to take the first step toward more refined and predictable panoramas on tripod, featuring a now obsolete (but near-new) Kaidan Quick Pan II QPU-2 indexing pano head at a great price on eBay.
The Kaidan company is now out of business, and the design is ancient by contemporary standards, coming from around the year 2000 (seems like so long ago in the Digital Era!). I have to be careful, since it is out of production, any replacement parts would have to be custom made. It came with no manual, so it's been interesting, to say the least!
One of the direct benefits is that its arrival has forced me to overhaul my trusty Manfrotto 3051 tripod to remove all slack or play, and most importantly and aggravatingly, to square up all the parts so that zeroing the tripod also zeros the head, which in turn zeros the panoramic plate with indexing. Sounds easy, until you have to figure and adjust by trial and error (hint -- the base tripod must be zeroed first).
That mission completed, I mounted the camera in the vertical position, and commenced firing, using the appropriate indents for various focal lengths. Trial and error again, but there are only so many choices (around 6). I'm only planning on single row panos, so that keeps things simpler for now.
I only estimated the nodal point got pretty good results. But for more exact overlaps of foreground objects, I would have to work with a grid to find the nodal point for all lenses I intend to use, and record the information. Still, just by guessing, based on other's published pano experience, I've got it in a useable setting already just by eye-balling the alignment.
This design is pretty good, but has been superceded by other brands like Kirk and Really Right Stuff, to name a few. Even Bogen/Manfrotto has an older style indexing system.
Following are some simple backyard examples of varous focal lengths and the use of different index settings, up to 20 per revolution for the full 360 pano with the 50mm Zeiss Contax lens. I believe the 100mmL segment was set on 32 per rev, using only a portion of 11 shots. Least shots was the 16mm was for frames at something like 12 per rev.
I'm still pretty green at this, but today's results are encouraging!
Gunzorro, if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them. I'm not really comfortable just blathering on and on without any direction.
This particular image is a little disappointing personally--the blue of the projector light is completely true to life, but the sickly yellow-orange of the vapor lamps is is way too juiced...but pulling the color back locally makes the image unbalanced. I'll reshoot when conditions are right and hope that changing the composition will let me bring the colors back where they need to be. I was also having gear issues when I shot this, which also taints my enjoyment of the image.
Unfortunately I don't have any other images I can share in the alt forum (I replaced my budget alts as quickly as I could and I've only shot a handful of panos, most of which are too bad to share).
Personally, I'm always intrigued by contrasts in tone and color. The blue/blue-violet/yellow are all quite impressive. I can understand that it's not what you intended, but it makes a strong statement.
My main question is simple: was this a 3-shot shifted pano?
Alright, I'm happy to share... You'll have to click on them, because they're large and hosted individually. All the ones I've listed below are shot with a Sony 850 and Tamron 28-75 f/2.8, which I guess is mildly alternative. I have others on my landscape section that are shot with Canon gear, but I'll leave those out of this thread.
If you get ahold of AutoPano somehow there just about isn't any workflow. Just point it to your card dump and it'll automatically assemble all of the panoramas contained inside.
You can PP before or after as desired - I've found no difference there.
Kent, what kind of panoramas do you want to do, multi-row or single-row. If the latter, and if you already have anything from RRS, then I would recommend their panorama rail. I also use Autopano Pro.
Some great landscape panoramas here. Don't you have trouble blending the individual shots? I never tried myself but I imagine water to be difficult since it's moving all the time. Maybe I underestimate the capabilities of the stitching softwares.
Here are my attempts.
