Panorama Technique

[David K]

I'd call myself an advanced beginner in terms of shooting panoramas and I'd like to improve my technique in this area. My current workflow goes something like this:

Set up the tripod and level the panning clamp. I use one of the RRS pano kits. Secure the camera to the pano head and eyeball it so that the center of the lens is over the rotation point of the tripod (my quickie technique to determine the nodal point/exit pupil of the lens).

Look thru the finder and get a rough idea of the FOV and how many degrees I can rotate my pano head between shots. Typically I'll select an overlap of approximately 20%.

Set the exposure mode to manual, meter the scene, take a test shot and check the histo. Adjust as necessary. Typically with MF I'll shoot these at f/11 or smaller depending on the lens' aperture range (thinking... max DOF but avoid diffraction here).

Focus manually on a distant point, take the first shot, rotate the pano head the number of degrees I determined above, continue the row.

If I'm shooting multi-row aim the camera upward allowing for approximately the same overlap selected earlier and continue shooting. If I'm looking to make a 360 degree pano I'll do the same thing with the camera pointing straight upwards and straight downwards.

In post I'll load up the images and convert to either 8 bit tiff or jpg with an eye on keeping the final file size manageable. If it's a one row pano I'll use Photoshop's photomerge. I'm also trying out some specialty software like PT Gui and AutoPano Pro. Process the images... look at the final garbled result asking me to manually find control points and wonder why I bother with this

 

[Jack]

Let's see some examples!

 

[jerryreed]

David,

The only step that you may be including, but did not mention, is to lock down the WB, this can most easily be done by selecting a KELVIN TEMP or by using a setting like "sunlight". You did not mention if you were using polarizing filters, but if you can avoid them it is a good idea, but if you cannot the stitching software is pretty good at blending the sky exposure differences that the polarizing filter will create.

Love to see some of your work.

Jerry

 

[David K]

Give me a bit to figure out how to link from the gallery...

 

[David K]

(With a bit of Admin help):

 

[Jack]

Looking pretty good David! Note the missed crop in the upper left, but that's an easy fix. ow about a small portion of the building or bridge at 100% for a detail shot?

 

[David K]

Hey, I need all the help I can get For the record I tried to follow these steps as posted in one of the LF forum threads by Jack.

1) Upload your image to the gallery, any size, only limit is 2MB
2) Forum software will upload the full image, and at the same time create a max 900x1200 version.
3) In your gallery you will have a thumb and the 900x1200.
3a) If you click on the 900x1200 image, you will get to the full size image you uploaded.
4) At each of these images is a bb-code link string underneath.
5) Copy this link
6) In your thread, use the embed image icon, the one up top that is a mountain with a sun in it
7) Insert the copied string in the dialog box, and presto, you are done.

 

[David K]

Here's a crop from one of the frames. Had to go back and reprocess this as a full sized tiff. As mentioned above I typically will process these as smaller jpegs so as not to choke my computer with a 1.5 GB file. As I'm looking at the crop it really is amazing how much detail you can get from these MF backs. I shot this with the Contax 645 on the Sinar e75LV back with Zeiss 45-90 f/4.5 zoom

 

[Jack]

David:

On the original upload, the only thing you did wrong was you selected the URL from your browser, and not the one right under the image -- that's the url string you need to insert with the little image upload icon

The crop above is impressive!!!

 

[jlm]

timely thread for me; today i climbed 50 feet down into a dry dock, about 5 ' below the props, with a 40mm, such a cool spot with this giant ship looming next to me...I felt cramped. set up the horseman and did a series of 9 shots using h and v shifts. haven't had the time to process, but it will be interesting to see if there is nasty color shift in the extremes. will post something later

 

[David K]

I never tire of seeing those boatyard images Jim, I'm looking forward to them.

 

[yaya]

Just a few notes;

1. keeping a levelled horizon or horizontal lines is important for the final compositions.
2. Try to leave an overlap of at least 25%
3. You should not fear changing exposures between frames as most softwares will handle blending quite well, but do it on the shutter speed rather than aperture.
4. Photomerge handles raw file so you can save a couple of steps and stay in 16bit until the final conversion.

Enjoy

Yair

 

[Ben Rubinstein]

Problem is that keeping the pano level is only possible if you are shooting with the camera totally level. If however you are shooting in the real world where you are tilting the camera up or down for composition then as you pan to the side your camera will no longer be level. The simplest way to get around this is to move the camera up or down a bit and 'fill in' the pano at the edges. This will be more necessary the more you pan to the side.

I'm using Autopano Pro and am losing suprisingly little off the edges due to the camera not being level eventhough I only use planar (rectilinear) stitching. It processes my 16 bit Tiffs developed from the RAW files and I can specify both horizontal and vertical detail that needs to be straight, far faster than messing around with the vanishing point and easier than using PS's perspective tool, I'm able to specify lines that need to be straight even if they weren't in real life and it looks natural in the final image!

I've got a thread in the 'Images to share' section of the forum using stitching on architecture/cityscapes. Most of them were taken using multiple shutter speeds to hold the DR and almost all were taken using careful refocusing between shots.

 

[jlm]

shot with horseman and h and v shifts, with rodagon 35mm, this took about 15 minutes from 9 raw images, processed to 9 jpgs, photmerged to one jpg for the web.

composed center image with ground glass adapter, shifted around to check max envelope, put on the CFV back, and shifted and shot away

 

[David K]

Yair,
Thanks for your input, it's kind of where I hope this thread goes... suggestions and comments about the difficulties involved in doing this sort of thing correctly. Keeping the horizon level when shooting the first (or only) row isn't that difficult... leveling the tripod head should take care of that. But in the pano I posted that didn't result in a good composition because the top of the building is too close to the top of the frame. To get more sky I would have either had to shoot with a wider lens (selection of the best focal length is one of the things I'd like to get some advice on) or add a second row above. The wider the lens the more distortion that needs to be handled in post and, if shooting a second row, with the camera tilted upwards you run into the issue Ben mentions. Your point about changing exposures between frames is something that I thought you were NOT supposed to do, but clearly I was wrong on this (confirmed by Ben) and this will be very helpful going forward. I attempted a 360 degree pano from the top of an observing platform recently and should have adjusted the exposure to compensate for the shadow area created by the clouds in some frames. Good to know that Photomerge handles RAW but unless it's only a handful of images my dual 2.8 Quad Core with 10 GB of Ram can't handle it, at least not in any time frame I'm willing to wait.

 

[David K]

Ben,
I find your comments quite helpful. I've been playing with the Autopano Pro demo (Jack suggested it to me) and it sounds great on paper. It crashed on me once or twice and that sort of lessened my enthusiasm a bit but I'll give it another go. According to the Autopano pro folks you can refocus and even zoom in between shots the latter being a concept I can't quite understand.

 

[David K]

Jim,
That's the sort of result I'm hoping to get but without resorting to yet another camera. I'm hoping to get close to that with my Rollei PCS when it gets back from service. Nice work here and a beautiful image.

 

[Ben Rubinstein]

David, how did it crash? When rendering a large file to anything but jpg it does take a very long time relatively (1/2 hr) and looks like it's crashed but check your Task Manager Processes (if you're using windows), it's there and working and using up resources. I've heard PTGUI is faster but don't know if it's as resource hungry. Kett the 'working' window of Autopano Pro on 'normal priority', It's the best if you are working on your computer at the same time.

Autopano Pro seems to like it if the file names are in the left to right order, I shoot middle, right, left and it seems to confuse it. A good trick if the program can't line up is to enter the control points editor, enter the Optimization Settings and change the RMS error setting to '2' then click on 'Optimize The Panorama'. Solves every alignment problem I've ever had, especially when it looks really confused.

Another trick which will maximise the amount of image used is to make sure that you enter the EXIF info should your images not have any - or turn off the 'adjust Lens Distortion'. The program is trying to adjust lens distortion and if it doesn't know what lens on what sensor size it gets confused and uses up too much of the image in its correction. Both these settings are in the first window under the box 'groups'.

Maybe sounds all a bit over complicated but these are the tricks I use when problems turn up which isn't often. In the Edit window the 'Verticals' and 'crop' tools are your biggest friends. If you draw the verticals/horizontals in then the program does all the vanishing point/yaw/pitch/roll nonsense for you to correct everything perspective and keystoning wise without fiddling with numbers and guesswork.

The tutorials on the site are pretty good to start with, with the above tips there shouldn't be much anything that can go wrong. I played with the program for 6 months before buying it, I do like it a lot.

 

[Ben Rubinstein]

p.s. if you want screen shots of any of the above let me know.

BTW, re: your questions, you don't need to shoot a full 2nd row, just nearer the edges. Personally I just shoot a bit wider and crop knowing that all the important stuff is safe, it's also useful for perspective adjustments, heck I've got loads of megapixels to work with!

As far as focusing and zooming are concerned, the program makes lens distortion adjustments so it can use images with a different zoom, as long as you haven't moved the perspective is the same technically. I refocus as I move up or down, especially useful because I use longer lenses close up and need to hold the foreground sharpness. The trick is to make sure that the maximum in every frame is in focus so the program is matching focus to focus between the frames. If you have areas in a frame OOF then crop out that section in the file before sending for stitch and let the program use a more in focus file for that element of the photograph.

This picture is a great example. Shot with a 70mm lens and with the foreground about 1/2 meter away from the tripod. Obviously it would be impossible to get the whole image in focus even stopped down with that focal length (needed to maintain perspective), I shot from the bottom up in tiny slices of sharp image all the way up the path then when I reached the stone on the left hand side, focused on it and shot the rest at f22. Worked a treat and an image I believe impossible to achieve in any other way has made me that pleased with myself!

 

[woodyspedden]

Jim,
That's the sort of result I'm hoping to get but without resorting to yet another camera. I'm hoping to get close to that with my Rollei PCS when it gets back from service. Nice work here and a beautiful image.

David

I have both Autopano Pro and PT Gui and like both. I have had a few more difficulties with AutoPano though than with PT Gui. However both can create very nice Pano's. I wonder which software is used by Arne Hvaring? He has posted some really great panos on these threads.

Woody