And a couple that actually made me money for a change! The current California Gift Show at the LA Convention Center's South Hall. Handheld, no less, through windows! 10 and 11 shot panos, Canon 24-70L.
Thanks Thrice, thats my 6 year old daughter, Maya. She's my little explorer, goes everywhere with me. Getting her to stand still long enough to do a couple of frames on the right end of the stitch was fun!
This shot was taken a decade ago with a 3 mp Canon G-1 and equally ancient software.
The Eastern slope of the Southern Sierra, the Owens River Valley
See Page 9 Post #2 of this thread for this image
I am returning this month to see if I can capture a similar shot with high quality dSLR equipment.
Mike K
Gunzorro wrote:
WOW!
It looks fake -- and I mean that in a complimentary way! Like an illustration. What a clear day.
I hope you can update this pano, even if it is hazy. The comparison would be great to see.
Gunzorro, It is hard to appreciate it when I took the original (Page 9 post #2 in this thread) but that really was an exceptionally clear morning in 2002. Here is the update taken with 5DII and 135L, a bit hazier weather, 28 shots, lots of pixels:
Very large panos like this really require a careful leveling of the rotation, or you will end up with the image curving upwards or downwards quite a lot. Thus the camera cannot be pointed downwards to capture more foreground. Almost half of the captured image is sky, and much of that is cropped away. The best one can do is shoot in portrait mode to capture more vertical information. I used a longer focal length prime lens (135L, one of Canon's better lenses) to get good mountain detail, but this sacrificed valley foreground, especially in the panos center region. This seems like an inherent compromise, as one is shooting a large stitched pano for the added detail, but the longer focal length lens also limits the vertical fov.
A friend pointed out that if had used a 90mm Tilt/Shift downward shifted I could have gotten more valley into the shot. I guess one could also do two horizontal rows and stitched that. I would need some additional hardware for that approach. Any other suggestions?
Mike K
Mike -- Excellent follow-up shot. Yes, it would be interesting to see a shifted 90mm lens, getting more of the valley. Still, this is awesome as it stands.
How do you stitch to keep everything looking straight. I'm good (retentively so) on leveling, but I can't seem to get PS to play nice with my captures when I try to go really wide like that.
How do you stitch to keep everything looking straight. I'm good (retentively so) on leveling, but I can't seem to get PS to play nice with my captures when I try to go really wide like that.
I usually use Auto pano pro and have to save it in PSD as the files are too large for TIFF format. I find that if I don't overlap by 1/3 frame the software often screws up the stitch. 1/4 frame is not enough. On my camera I use the grid feature that divides the LCD into a 3x3 grid which makes estimating the amount of rotation for overlap very easy.
See thread in this forum on "stitching software".
Mike K
here's a quick stitch i did to test out the hugin software (quite impressed). roughly 80 degrees (more boring parts cropped out from a 200 degree pano) with the contax g 35/2 and a sony NEX-3: http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6143/5979919557_0057efff47_o.jpg
i feel 1/3 is marginal for completely reliable stitching. 1/2 is 100% reliable even until very difficult situations with moving elements that have to be rendered without ghosting.
Herb...
Mike K wrote:
I find that if I don't overlap by 1/3 frame the software often screws up the stitch. 1/4 frame is not enough. On my camera I use the grid feature that divides the LCD into a 3x3 grid which makes estimating the amount of rotation for overlap very easy.
The current California Gift Show at the LA Convention Center's South Hall. Handheld, no less, through windows! 10 and 11 shot panos, Canon 24-70L.
