I'm going to try a pano this weekend. Need help :)

So, I'm planning on trying a panorama with photoshop this weekend. I need help however. I fooled around with one tonight. However, I made the mistak of taking my photo's in 18mm wide angle. In this case, because of the distortion, I was unable to stitch the images. Basically, what focal length should I use for the multiple images? 50mm?

Whoops. Meant to put this in ViewFinder! How do I move it?

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Originally Posted by Todd Patten

Whoops. Meant to put this in ViewFinder! How do I move it?

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lol.

I was thinking the same thing...
you could always just "edit" and post a picture to critique............roflmao

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Originally Posted by Todd Patten

So, I'm planning on trying a panorama with photoshop this weekend. I need help however. I fooled around with one tonight. However, I made the mistak of taking my photo's in 18mm wide angle. In this case, because of the distortion, I was unable to stitch the images. Basically, what focal length should I use for the multiple images? 50mm?

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Hi Todd,

I really have only limited experience in shooting panoramics. Actually, I woke up one fine morning and told myself that this should be possible to do with 35 mm film camera... Obviously I re-discovered something that people have been doing already for a long time... but he! Got me thinking about it!

All I can say is that Panos are quite 'technical'. There are few difficulties:

Composition: by definition, if your pano. involves stitching different frames, you do not see the final version in the viewfinder. Therefore, you have to think carefully about composition: what to put in the FG for instance, and where to put it. What the subject is, etc.... And then you have to try to imagine what the final result will look like.

Subject: If the whole scene is moving (e.g. monstrous hawaian waves), the moving object(s) will have moved from one frame to the other... not a good idea! However, you can take a pano with smaller moving objects which are not going to be spread accross two frames (am I making sense here?)... be carefull with large bodies of water with small ripples. The ripples will not match perfectly which will not look too good on the overall pic since they will not align perfectly when stitching. Look at my last post for an example of what not to do! I should have used a much longer exposure to totally blur the water.... still learning!

Horizon: each frame will have to line up perfectly well in order to make your life easier in PS. If this is your first try, I would suggest you find a view with a horizon, such as a large body of water. If your viewfinder has a grid, you are in business. Align the grid exactly on the horizon, and that should be fine. You can also put your tripod perfectly horizontal, in which case, the horizon will be right in the middle of the frame. To have a perfectly levelled tripod head, use a bubble level (a good one!)!

Exposure: Shoot for the highlights! Find out what will be the brightest subject in the scene and meter it. The brightest subject might not be in the first frame! If you have a very contrasted scene, make sure your shadows are not going to turn black!

DOF: often(for panos), you want as much DOF as possible so that the FG and BG are in focus.

Manual setting: once you have decided the exposition and DOF, turn everything manual (exposure, focus). Otherwise, your camera may try to adapt the exposure or slightly change the focus in the subsequent frames.

Lens: I always thought that 50 mm and higher were the only lenses you could use for pano.... Nope! you can use lower! It's just going to be more difficult in PS to stitch. My last post was with a 24 mm. I would not go below that.

Overlay: If you use a lens <50 mm, you should overlay each frame by about 50% or more. That will simplify your work in PS to find the best 'stitch' (not necessarily a straight line). If you have a lens >50mm, I guess you can overlay your frames by about 25 % and that should be OK.

Scanner: if you use film and scan your slides, I would suggest not to mount your slides, so that they will align perfectly when scanning.

Photoshop: lots of different ways of doing the job. I am using what John Shaw recommends in his book 'Photoshop: a field guide'... I am going to stay quiet and respect his copyrights! It is a lenghty process and a bit tedious. But it works OK.

And after that if you still want to take panos... well good luck!

Looking forward to the result!

Cheers,

Steph.

A couple things I discovered when I tried:

I tried to take into consideration the highest and lowest points I wanted to include in the final. But for whatever reason, some of the shots' horizon lines were at different levels (strange, since I had the camera sitting on top of a post, should have kept the horizon line steady) but anyway, I had to crop some off the top and bottom of different shots, which ate into my lake and sky more than I liked.

My pano was a rather long exposure at sunset. During the time it took to pan around and get each shot at about 10 second exposures each, the sky had changed color slightly in each frame as the sun went down. I still don't know how to get around that.

If you ever want to frame it, plan ahead and make it something of a normal size, at least height wise. Otherwise you're talking a very expensive custom frame. If it's a normal height, you might be able to purchase your own frame extensions for the width. Do your research before shooting.

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Originally Posted by kellybean

If you ever want to frame it, plan ahead and make it something of a normal size, at least height wise. Otherwise you're talking a very expensive custom frame. If it's a normal height, you might be able to purchase your own frame extensions for the width. Do your research before shooting.

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I gave up on custom framing. Do everything myself. Doesn't look as nice, but I believe in being self sufficient. Actually, my bank account believe in it more than I do :D !

In your opinion, what is the maximum ratio for a pano? 1:4, 1:3? ... or smaller?

On John Fielder web site, he posts different pano format. Maybe that's the way to go (small pano, medium pano, large pano)?

Cheers,

Steph.

Steph, Thanks for putting so much info into your reply! even though Todd asked for help, I copied and kept your post, as it will be very helpful to me in the future, if i ever want to attempt a panoramic!!!


Thanks! :D

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Originally Posted by Clicker

Steph, Thanks for putting so much info into your reply! even though Todd asked for help, I copied and kept your post, as it will be very helpful to me in the future, if i ever want to attempt a panoramic!!!


Thanks! :D

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My pleasure!

I've taken many a panorama in my day, and I'd have to say it's my favorite style. Just more options for creativity if you ask me (not to mention file size and REALLY big prints).

Like Steph said above, the longer the lens, the easier it will be to stitch later on. This one below was taken with a 300mm (effectively 450mm) with a D70.

Some of the best information and most interesting shots I've seen can be found on Max Lyons' site: http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/

So have fun with it!

This guy was climbing the Flat Irons out in Boulder, Colorado this weekend. (6 images stitched together)
<center>
<img src="http://www.sit.wisc.edu/~rslowinski/photos/flatir~1.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
</center>

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Originally Posted by b_slow

I've taken many a panorama in my day, and I'd have to say it's my favorite style. Just more options for creativity if you ask me (not to mention file size and REALLY big prints).

Like Steph said above, the longer the lens, the easier it will be to stitch later on. This one below was taken with a 300mm (effectively 450mm) with a D70.

Some of the best information and most interesting shots I've seen can be found on Max Lyons' site: http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/

So have fun with it!

This guy was climbing the Flat Irons out in Boulder, Colorado this weekend. (6 images stitched together)

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Great composition. I love the simplicity of it. The sky, the guy, the rock and a tree... Can't be much simpler than that! I start to really look forward to a digital camera! The scanning process makes you loose so much in terms of dynamic range... unless of course you have a drum!

Great pic.

Cheers,

Steph.

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Originally Posted by Todd Patten

So, I'm planning on trying a panorama with photoshop this weekend. I need help however. I fooled around with one tonight. However, I made the mistak of taking my photo's in 18mm wide angle. In this case, because of the distortion, I was unable to stitch the images. Basically, what focal length should I use for the multiple images? 50mm?

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If I could add one thing to what everyone else has already said it would be, don't bite off more than you can chew. I would take maybe between 3 and 6 shots to stitch together first. My first attempt at a pano shot was 12 shots of verying exposures. I ended up cutting out the entire sky and replacing it with one from a 13th shot and making my mid day lake pano into a sunset shot. My final result looks nothing like what I started with, but I am very happy with it. It took me a full weekend and several days of tweeking here and there to get it to the point where I'm finaly done with it. I look forward to taking more shots and working with them in the future. That first pano is a great learning experiance, or at least it was for me. Oh, and one more thing. Check to see if any of your software has a stitching program. That would have saved me about 10 hours of work had I know that I have a stitching program on my computer already. I'm not to bright sometime. :D

I had my pano posted here before, but if you want to check it out, here ya go.

Michael

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Originally Posted by mjs1973

If I could add one thing to what everyone else has already said it would be, don't bite off more than you can chew. I would take maybe between 3 and 6 shots to stitch together first. My first attempt at a pano shot was 12 shots of verying exposures. I ended up cutting out the entire sky and replacing it with one from a 13th shot and making my mid day lake pano into a sunset shot. My final result looks nothing like what I started with, but I am very happy with it. It took me a full weekend and several days of tweeking here and there to get it to the point where I'm finaly done with it. I look forward to taking more shots and working with them in the future. That first pano is a great learning experiance, or at least it was for me. Oh, and one more thing. Check to see if any of your software has a stitching program. That would have saved me about 10 hours of work had I know that I have a stitching program on my computer already. I'm not to bright sometime. :D

I had my pano posted here before, but if you want to check it out, here ya go.

Michael

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Pano can be fun... and for sure they give something to do during rainy week-ends!

I admire your patience!

I've recently tried to take a 4 shots pano with the camera in a portrait mode. To add to the difficulty, the scene had a 8 stop dynamic range to it. So I am planning to first combine exposure and then stitch the pano. If this does not work, I will first stitch the two panos with different exposures, and then combine them. We'll see what works best!

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Originally Posted by Todd Patten

So, I'm planning on trying a panorama with photoshop this weekend. I need help however. I fooled around with one tonight. However, I made the mistak of taking my photo's in 18mm wide angle. In this case, because of the distortion, I was unable to stitch the images. Basically, what focal length should I use for the multiple images? 50mm?

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Don't toss out those images shot with your 18mm lens. I use Pt Gui to make a lot of Panos and it will work with very wide angle lenses. Goto http://www.ptgui.com/ to download the free trial software.

Yes, you will end up with some distortion at times but other than that it works extremely well and takes a lot of the work out of the job. You just line up your images in a row. Then mark points that link the individual images together. After you are done with that you hit run and it does the rest for you.

here is the last pano I did, hand held in bad lighting at the Minnesot Vikings football game I was at a week or two ago. It consits of about six or seven shots with a 16mm lens. Not a very good pano, especially the changes in exposure because of the overhead lights, but also done in a rush and hardly any work on the computer

http://www.midwestbicycle.com/images/vikingsSmall.jpg