How about panoramas?

[koalcghaer]

Hello!

I am new in photography, but I love to stitch panoramas to get wide angle photos. And what about you? Do you like taking panoramic photos? How often do you take it?

Here is the example of my pano taken in Xi'an, China. Used gear: Nikon D700, 24 mm lens, PanoEdit (PanoEdit).

[Tito87]

Welcome to DPS. Good picture. I've only shot panorama one time, and it didn't look as nice as yours.

[Matthias099]

I do panoramas on occasion. Like this:



I don't use special software to stitch them. For this I used the Windows Live Gallery Photo viewer/editor. I think the result looks okay. What do you think?
There are some more on my Flickr page with the same program. I just try to have a good amount of overlap. It works fine for me.

[ArmySoldier777]

I didn't use to do panoramas very often, but have found myself doing more lately. Especially when photographing rooms indoors or doing landscape shots. Since I don't have an ultra wide lens currently "other than the way too soft and low quality 18-55mm kit lens", I started using my nifty fifty and just doing panorama shots of landscapes. I've found one really great use for doing panoramas is the Image Quality. When I'm looking at an image like that, sometimes I like to zoom in to different areas to check things out and see what's there. If it's a single wide angle shot, then you're not going to have a whole lot of detail in those areas. However, shooting with my 50mm, it's already zoomed in closer to all those places, so the image detail is there for you to see .

So my three basic reasons for doing panorama shots are:
1) Great image quality
2) Cheaper than buying a wide angle lens
3) Well done panorama shots just look cool



That being said, I'll share a panorama story with you that happened last night.

I decided to do a panorama shot of the inside of my apartment last night. There wasn't a real purpose behind it, just figured I'd give it a shot "no pun intended". Since I was indoors, I ended up using my kit lens at 18mm, but you also have to keep in mind it was on a crop body. Because of the low and tricky lighting situations, I had to shoot at a much wider aperture than I wanted, so there ended up being all kinds of focus issues between the different images. Yes I was on a tripod, and yes I know I could've just lowered the shutter speed.. But like I said, I was just playing around with it and wanted to get to the post processing lol. Little did I know how much not paying attention to detail was going to come back and kick my ass.. I took 10 shots, 5 on the bottom row, and 5 on top.

Then I processed the Raw files so that all the exposures were as close as possible. Most Panorama software can autocorrect exposure issues for you, but sometimes it helps it along if you do it before hand. Lately I've been using a program called ptGui as well as Hugin, just to get a feel for each and see what the pros and cons of each piece of software is. Hugin didn't want to handle the files well at all when I loaded them in, so I decided just to skip to ptGui. Well, it created decent control points between the images so that they lined up..but there was an issue.. There was so much distortion of the subjects in the scene between each shot that it was having a Very difficult time lining up edges. After about 3 hours of adding hundreds of control points and tweaking settings, I still just couldn't get it perfect. There was always an edge somewhere on a subject that just wouldn't line up between shots. I know I had made it pretty difficult for this piece of software from the get-go, but I was still frustrated after all this work. There was just no way that ptGui was going to align these images properly no matter how much work I put into it. And that was kind of disappointing since it had always performed so well for me in the past.

At this point, I remembered Photoshop's CS5 Photomerge feature.. I had no idea why I'd even forgotten about it, but I had. I opened up Photoshop with absolutely no confidence that it was going to do any better than ptGui had after all the work I'd put into it. I was so wrong.. I loaded the 10 Tiff files and waiting for Photomerge to align them for me and.. everything fit perfectly! I didn't know whether to be happy, or upset that I'd spent so much time not using it in the first place lol. I'll add the shot below. Keep in mind that it wasn't anything spectacular, I was just playing around with it. But I also learned how important getting things right the first time is, as well as how much of a difference the software you use afterwards can make. Tonight I might try putting on the 50 and re-shooting the apartment and seeing just how well Photomerge handles what I'm guessing is going to be around 30 or 40 images lol.

Just wanted to add this story incase somebody who reads this is thinking about different Panorama programs to buy. If you've already got Photoshop, you may not need anything more. I believe that the Photomerge feature first showed up in CS3, but I could be mistaken.




David

[inkista]

I should probably join pano shooters anonymous. I'm one of those people that definitely needed to go past what Photoshop and Photostitch could do for me, and I happily own a license for PTGui (Hugin would be the open source alternative).

For some of us, 180° isn't enough. We want full spherical coverage. 360x180. I use an 8mm circular fisheye.



That's a pano shot from the middle of a doorway next to the 3rd-floor landing of a 70-year old used bookstore that, alas, is no more (Wahrenbrock's).

Here's the interactive version (Flash required). You can not only spin all the way around, you can also look straight up at the ceiling and straight down at the floor.

And should you want to fold an origami ballon to represent the space, here ya go.





Like I said. I probably need a 12-step program at this point....

[The LoKW]

Good work all! TFS

Inkista, that interactive version is amazing (worth a how to if you ask me!) particularly as it documents a cool shop that is no longer around in a way that really takes the viewer into the space. Extremely well done!

[inkista]

Ah, someday I may get around to a how-to, but for now, you're probably stuck with the articles I posted here:

• How to embed an interactive QTVR panorama clip into my blog??
• Sleeping Beauty Castle (little planet)

...and tutorials about the web, like this one.

In terms of the interactive viewer, all you have to do is post the equirectangular on Flickr, make sbprzd a contact/friend with access to the larger sizes, and then use his viewer, substituting in the flickr number of your image for the one in the link.

http://seb.perez-duarte.net/panoviewer/?photo=%20flickrnumber

[Krusty79]

Thanks for all the info here. If you like panoramas, did you see this thread I posted a while back?

New panoramic camera you throw in the air...

Does it make it harder to stitch images taken at a wide angle like 18mm because of the distortion?

[ccting]

use photoshp paramount

[koalcghaer]

Thank you all for the answers!

Inkista, your example of origami projection is very interesting!
Here is another example: panorama of building made closely. In this case rectilinear projection looks better and more plausibly than equirectangular projection.

Gear used: Nikon D700, 24 mm lens, PanoEdit (PanoEdit)