Gunzorro
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rji2goleez -- Great shot! Glad you found the thread. Looking forward to more of your work.
denoir -- Another terrific example and explanation! 
AhamB wrote:
Depends on the distance to objects in the foreground. With very wide panos they can get distorted a lot (also depending on the projection you use).
See HerbChong's remarks about his panos a few pages back. For most things you don't need a nodal slide, because stitching software is simply that good. For multi-row panos it helps to have at least a panning base to keep the rows straight. Multi-row panos are challenging to do hand held because it's difficult to do straight panning by hand. If your rows aren't straight you'll have to crop after stitching, which means you lose of AOV.
I guess wide angle lenses with a lot of distortion need to be corrected before you try stitching the shots. Longer FL's will be easier to stitch in general.
Wich FL you choose depends on the distance to the subject, the amount of DOF and the coverage that you want. ...Show more →
AhamB and Herb -- Great replies! I just wanted to pitch in my views to Rusty.
1) It is always better to take in too wide of an AOV than too little. You can always exclude and crop, but you can never add what you didn't record. As you can see from my latest examples, I used lenses on full frame from 50mm down to 16mm, but most at 35mm and 50mm. Most of my single and double row panos are 4-6 shots wide with the 50mm, and in general between 80-120 degrees. As mentioned, lenses beyond 80mm start to have DOF issues, unless the subject is all near infinity.
Choose the lens with a its "native" horizontal AOV high enough when in the vertical position to cover the tallest subjects without tilting the lens, or figure how many rows you will need and use a slightly narrower lens (you do tilt the lens up and down in multi-rows, but there is one row you keep level as a standard for alignment).
All focal lengths in my examples are shot vertical, so it makes the lens a narrower AOV -- with overlap, a 50mm becomes like an 80-90mm. Let's say it's 85mm and a 16 degree horizontal AOV with the overlap included -- shoot five shots, and you have 5x16 = 80 degrees, equal to the horizontal angle of around a 22mm lens on FF. Shoot 10 shots with the same set-up, and you get 160 degrees horizontal. For my shots with 3 rows of 6 with the 50mm, I get a nearly square image with AOV of a 17mm lens -- but taller! That's pretty impressive! And as denoir demonstrated the other day, you are pushing the IQ of 6x7 film, or larger.
2) I don't shoot strict infinity-stop focus, except very rarely. I focus on the main range of subject wide open, then stop down to my estimated hyperfocal distance on a manual lens -- simpler on an auto lens, then switch off AF. You don't really want much that is close to the camera as it will dominate and obscure the distant view, so it is a self-correcting matter. For 'flat" or angled away landscapes, you can still use your Tilt/Shift lense to obtain near to far focus at reasonable apertures (shifts work great too for urban landscapes!).
3) At the moment, I'm really liking that Zeiss Contax 50mm/1.4 T* (but it is my newest addition) -- nice AOV for pano and nice IQ. You can simply keep adding shots to achieve a wider angle, and keep adding rows! But the 16-35L is really indispensible for this work -- you don't want to be changing lenses all the time. Favorite lenses -- 16 to 85. For hand held, I would favor wider lenses, as the alignment effort is too much to keep six images straight for one row, let alone multi-row shots. Probably the best place to start with FF is the 35mm, and 24 in crop frames.
And I agree with the other posters -- correct major lens aberrations (including CA) in PP before stitching. I use LR, and love that it has a quality profile for the 16-35LII -- it not only straightens, but fixes light fall-off. I don't fix anything with the 50mm Zeiss -- it is pretty clean, with only slight barrel distortion. My usual workflow is LR for initial exposure, distortion, and sharpening on individual images. Then to PSE8 for stitching and cropping. Then back to LR for final exposure, perspective, and cropping the composite image.
Hopes this helps with your planning.
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