I will be heading to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park and want to try my hand at panoramas. I have a small kit and will be borrowing some of my friend's gear for the trip. I won't have much time to practice with his gear until the trip itself, or a few days before.
My stuff:
Rebel XT
24-105L
35L
His stuff I'll borrow:
5D
70-200 f/2.8L IS+1.4X
I plan to put the 70-200 on my Rebel XT and my 24-105 on his 5D. Specifically for panoramas would you guys recommend the 35L or the 24-105L? I hear the 24-105L vignettes and has quite a bit of distortion, which I assume would make post-processing panoramas difficult. I'm guessing I'd probably want to bump up to 28 or 35mm on the 24-105 on the 5D. Should I just use the 35L instead if I'm shooting panoramas?
Your plan to use the "70-200 on my Rebel XT and my 24-105 on his 5D" covers a lot of territory. It's a great setup for many situations. For panos, you need a good tripod, and you should probably have a panoramic head. I use a Nodal Ninja 3. It's OK to use an "ordinary" tripod head when there is nothing in the near- or middle-ground (i.e. the subject is all at near-infinity distance), but you get much better results (and require a lot less distortion-control in post-processing), if you can rotate and elevate the camera about its entrance pupil (a la pano head), rather than about the base of the camera (as for normal heads - tripod ring telephotos not withstanding, whatever the hell that means). I prefer to use normal and short telephoto lenses, from about 50mm to 85mm for panoramas, as they have very little (to no) distortion. The 35L (which I don't have), should be a good candidate, but your 24-105L at 50mm might do a good job, too. It all depends on how much distortion you get, how many "panels" you have to combine, and how you plan to deal with it (with respect to "actions" and automatic processing, vs. "manual" merging).
I've used the 5D and 24-105 with a ball head to make panoramas. They come out very well. Perhaps it depends on what you intend to do with them. If they're for personal use, this should be fine. If you're going to print them at something like 2 or 3 meters long and display them, then you may need the special head Jcolwell is referring to.
Their is some talk about vignetting and distotion with the 24-105 and you do get some, but that's true of almost all zooms. Vignetting is visible occasionally at 24mm but not otherwise. Distortion? Can't say I've ever noticed any. I use this lens more than any other and think it's fabulous.
I'm not sure if you're talking about spherical panos or regular panos... for spherical I use Nodal Ninja head and it works with the 40D, so your 5D should work with the head as well. You'll want to use a super wide-angled lens to minimize the stitching you need to do. Most people with 5Ds use the Canon 15mm fisheye lens.
There is distortion with the 24-107L at the 24mm end, but you should not be shooting at the 24mm end for panos. Probably the best focal length for multiple-frame panos would be between 50 and 90mm .... depending on the scene in front of you.
I prefer longer lenses for panoramas; the 70-200 is a great choice as would the 24-105, but I'd shoot from 35mm or longer. 99% of my panos have been handheld, although I now have a RRS pano elements kit, which I haven't tried yet.
i use a 24-105 at all focal lenghts for my pano work. i dont have a pano head and just rotate the tripod head. you will suprised by the results. i have used up to my 100-400 for panos, with my 70-200f4 coming a close second for use.
you only need to worry about VERY close objects if you are worried about parralax error. ive never had any problems. make sure everything is in manual mode. when you come to process them makesure in acr that they are all selected and synchronised.
all of my pano work can be seen here. www.spfoto.co.uk
as for about not printing big without a pano head and selling them, well thats tosh! ive just printed a 45" pano framed and mounted, taken with the exact things mentioned above, and its bloody awsome. i have no problem with the quality and sell these through my site.
Vignetting is easily fixed for each image and should not hinder making a pano.
However, if you want to stitch images together to make a great pano then it is more important that the overlapping parts of the images are equally sharp and undistorted. That may or may not make wider and cheaper lenses less suitable. Tele prime lenses are more likely to be uniformaly sharp across the entire full-frame image area.
Any 50mm lens is likely to work very well and the 50 f/1.8 is pretty cheap too.
The 24-105 is excellent for panos, but I don't know why you would ever shoot at 24mm. I rarely shoot lower than 50mm. This pano was shot at about 70mm. It's 14 shots over 2 rows, also with a 5D
I tend to shoot most of my panos at 50mm and longer to avoid vignettes and losing sharpness in the edges, AND not getting strange foreground info. the 24-105 definitely vignettes quite a bit in general. Using a 50mm stopped down to f11 will give you much better results and will be lighter. The 35, a 50 and your 70-200 sounds like a solid combo.
I think it depends on how large you want the panoramas to be.
I have bee playing aroun with the 85/1,8 on my 40D and found it to be perfect for HUGE panos.
If you like to get an overview of Stuttgart (Germany) - watch this
74000 by approx. 3800 pixels.
Tried it before with wide-angel lenses and found it to be a pain in the a** stiching the pictures.
Thanks everyone for the great advice. Sounds like I was way off base by assuming I'd want to shoot with a wide focal length like 24mm. I wasn't aware of the different tripod head options. All around great advice and much appreciated everyone!
I mainly use 50mm or 100mm primes as my pano lens. Only once have I gone as wide as 35mm. I shot Artist Point in Yellowstone, trying both 100 and 200mm primes. I have a superb pano of the Grand Tetons with a 300mm lens, where I wanted to get the distant mountains and ajacent tree line, yet was shot from the highway. The 300 brought the distant jagged peaks into sharp detail, with a thin long line of fog hanging mid-mountain. Do shoot only manual exposure to avoid exposure changes during the series. I love PTGui as my stitching software.
As mentioned before, if your subject is far off in the distance and there is nothing in the foreground, you don't really need a specialized Panorama head. However, once you HAVE one, they're great. I use Bogen's QTVR head because it has large adjustments that allow you to use different lenses. This has paid off, as I am now using a different camera and lens combination than when I first started 3 years ago.
A Pano head is a must IMHO if you are going to be doing QTVR's of any type. And it's a definitely plus when making panos for flat printing.
CurtisBilly wrote:
Thanks everyone for the great advice. Sounds like I was way off base by assuming I'd want to shoot with a wide focal length like 24mm.
It's not off base, it just depends. I've shot (handheld) panoramas at 16mm but also at 500mm (35mm equivalents).
On FF body (1ds2) I use my 35 the most and my 50 second followed by my 85 last. 99% of the time I use 35L. But my cam is FF so do the math to figure out what the is on 1.6 crop.
On edit some members got cranky when I posted samples so here are the links.
http://208.112.37.136/gallery2/main.php
Edited by madmax200 on Feb 17, 2008 at 07:50 PM GMT
