The GetDPI Photography Forum

Great to see you here. Join our insightful photographic forum today and start tapping into a huge wealth of photographic knowledge. Completing our simple registration process will allow you to gain access to exclusive content, add your own topics and posts, share your work and connect with other members through your own private inbox! And don’t forget to say hi!

4x5 Multi-Sheet Panorama technique with a Travelwide 90?

I saw some work by a photographer recently, and he had made these fantastic multi-frame panoramas. They were scans of the full negative, including the edge, the I presume he used photoshop to place them next to each other for a near perfect panorama. I say he probably use PS because they were pigment inkjet prints. I'd like to try doing this on my trip to Maine this summer with my Travelwide 90. What is the overall technique?

Is it best to level out the tripod head, and then do a pan? Or must the camera be move 'shift-wase' to the right or left? Obviously, the TW has no shift. Are there any good tricks to lining up the edges of the frame so everything looks right when the two frames are put together? The TW has a rudimentary ground glass but it's edge illumination is not great. I do have a optical finder though and I'll likely be focusing at infinity.

What would be ideal...is if I could work out the exact number of notches by degrees on the pan of my Gitzo head. But if I just pan the camera like that will the panoramas be unusably distorted?

Any input here would be welcome!
 

pfigen

Member
If you want to a panorama and you don't have shifting on your camera, you are going to have to rotate your camera for each shot. If you want to print the full frame images and display them side by side by side, and aren't worried too much about a perfect seamless panorama, you can just shoot and rotate to a point where the right edge becomes the left edge and repeat until you're done. The images will line up reasonably well and you'll have the effect of a panorama. If, however, you actually want a perfect seamless image, you'll need to do a few things differently. One is that, yes, it's very helpful to level the camera. Then you want to position the camera so the nodal point of the lens is directly over the rotating axis of the tripod head. Read on Really Right Stuff's site on how to do that. Then you're going to want to overlap at least thirty percent of the image with each frame to give the stitching software something to grab. The last thing that will trip you up is how much foreground you have with a 90mm lens (I'm assuming you're shooting with a 90).The higher you can get off the ground, the easier it's going to be to deal with the parallax of a rotating foreground with a wide angle lens. The further the distance from the lens, the easier it is to blend. You might want test this out using something like a 28mm lens on a full frame digital camera to test how this is actually going to work in the field - without going to the trouble of shooting, processing and scanning film.
 
Top