Stitched panoramics

This

came from these

using this

I have a long history of panoramic images as my go-to format for my personal work. I composed an entire book once, on my travels through Ireland, with largely black and white panoramics shot with an Xpan. Since shooting in digital, I have casually played with stitched pans, and sometimes post one on my Daily Photo blog.

 Last week I took delivery of a panoramic kit from Really Right Stuff that allows multiple rows of shooting to make a stitched pan. The way to do stitch pan shots right is to be on a leveled tripod, and with an apparatus that permits the camera to rotate around the nodal point of the lens. That way, when you rotate the camera, there is no parallax issue. Objects at varying distances from the lens stay aligned no matter how you move the camera. I've used a panoramic base for years that allows me to shoot a single row of images that are easily stitched together. With this 3 way gimbal setup, I can shoot up, down, and sideways, and the camera is centered around a parallax-free point in 3 dimensions. I can shoot 360° if I want.

 Although there is a Photoshop option to merge images into a panoramic format, I use a stand alone app called PTGui, which allows very fine control of all parts of the stitch process. It analyzes the component images, finds the overlapping points, and warps the images to whatever panoramic projection you choose.

 The image from 2 days ago was with a Mercator projection. In today's photo, I shot in all directions from a point under my madrona tree. Every direction was covered. I chose a 360x360 circular projection, and this is what I got. I'm just at the beginning of learning how to previsualize this format, and how to control the software to achieve something beyond a novelty shot.

Comments

[Mike Chisholm]

That is utterly bizarre, Doug, the world condensed to a wasps' nest...

Good to see you haven't entirely abandoned blogging!

Mike

[Dan]

Doug-what lens did you use?

[Doug Plummer]

My 24-105mm, set at 24. The wider you use, the more attentive you have to be with parallax, as you'll tend to be closer to things. I've shot a tone of pans handheld and fixing up the mismatches later, but this rig makes it painless.