08-27-08 – Panoramics

I’m glad people enjoyed this… it’s one of my passions so I hope it catches on 🙂

I’m probably one of the more experienced panorama users… I’ve been doing it for 4 years now. The baseball picture is one of the first major panoramas I did, in the summer of 2005 😛 So it was very cool to use it this week!

To answer some of the questions about panorama photography that I’ve seen:

COMPOSITION: Look at your scene, decide what the focal point of your picture will be and how it will be framed in a panoramic shot. For example, if you have a building you like, it’s good to stand at the very center and shoot around it, or stand to one side of it and shoot around it so it is off to the side. The rule of threes really doesn’t apply to panoramas very well, I call it the rule of 5ths. Because a panorama is usually about 5x as wide as it is tall, you can imagine your guidelines as a grid like: [][][][][] I tend to find the more powerful shots have prominent figures inside those brackets. Vertically, the rule of thirds apply.

LIGHTING: Exposure is key… as we can see this week… even if its meant for artistic effect, a panorama can really lose a lot of power if the exposure settings are not consistent for every exposure. I generally use my D50 and focus on the entire scene, panning across it at my lens’ optimal f stop, reading the meter to decide on exposure length. You want to avoid blown highlights at all costs for a panorama, because while it may look OK zoomed out, in reality, a blown highlight could be very very big.

KEEP IT LEVEL: Again, highlighted in this contest, uneven pictures create a “jagged” effect that can be artistic, but often simply makes it look like an incomplete mars rover picture. Tripods are helpful here, but so is simply keeping an eye on the horizon and keeping it in the same place in your viewfinder. Keeping the camera level as you rotate is MUCH HARDER than it sounds, so be very mindful that as you twist your hips, you tend to tilt the lens in the opposite direction. The straighter the images, the easier the stitching software will be able to find good matches.

DO YOU NEED A PANORAMA HEAD?: These can be cheap or expensive, depending on the quality. My short answer is absolutely not. I’ve never used one, and I have a ton of high quality panoramas. However, if you:
1) don’t have a lot of experience in spot correction digitally
2) want to take indoor panoramas (real estate, art exhibition, etc) or panoramas of objects at varying distances
You would definitely notice a difference between a regular tripod and a panorama head.

Corsec67 is quite right… his parking garage image, striking as it is, has many stitch errors on the parking lines due to the camera not rotating on its nodal point. Had he dropped $300 on a panorama head, those parking lines would have come out smooth.

SHOOTING: Easy rule. Only the center 3/5ths of your image should be “new” with each shot, 1/5th on either side should be overlap. This is helpful not only for the computers stitching efforts, but also to keep your lens’ sweet spot focused and to reduce the harmful effects of vignetting on panoramic photography.

ADVANCED SHOOTING TIPS:

1) Time is on your side. You do not have to capture your panorama in 5 seconds (unless you are strictly photojournalistic!). If you are taking a panorama of a crowded street, for each shot, wait until there is nobody straddling the borders of your image! Just wait until there’s a free space, then click! This will reduce “people ghosting” / “halfpeople” that are in a ton of panoramas.

2) Add Sky. If there are some cloudy textures to be seen, take another row panorama of the sky ABOVE your panorama, at the same exposure settings. This extra row could add valuable real estate and also provide natural beauty. My HK Harbour is an extreme example of that… 7 rows are represented! (In reality, there is only about 4 rows of data, but I used 7 rows with significant overlap). Had I stuck with one row, it would have simply been the buildings.

3) Crop your final image. Some programs do it automatically, some don’t. You may go for the effect, but most people would prefer to look at a rectangular image for the finished product.

4) Go Vertical. Vertical panoramas are MUCH MORE Challenging than horizontal, due to the sharp parallax difference between the ground you’re standing on and infinity off in the mountains you’re looking at.

Recommended software:
Expensive: Adobe Photoshop (CS 2 is inferior to CS 3, and honestly, CS 3 rivals the best panoramic stitching software out there… I used to be very uppity about doing things manually, but CS 3 does a quick, efficient, and usually accurate job)

Not Cheap but Not Expensive: ArcSoft Panorama Maker 4 (It does NOT work well for tiled panoramas, despite what the packaging says, but it is a very powerful program for vertical and horizontal stitching.

Cheap: Autostitch – the king! As cheap as you want it to be, and while not simple, it is not difficult to learn. I find it tends to create more banding problems than other software, but you can’t beat the price.

Manually (do-it-yourself): It’s very easy. Align the pictures up, starting from the middle, at 50% opacity, and then blend the layers together. You can use the paintbrush to fine tune your mask if you see ghosting. This is time intensive but more satisfying results are almost guaranteed.

I know my ship wasn’t the best…. I stood in one place and fired off the camera as it went by. Then used autostitch.
My keyboard turned out much better technically I think…

I worried about the build quality of the panosaurus when I first saw it, but I’ve heard it’s excellent. I’ve yet to purchase any of them, so I don’t really know about the prices. I guess $300 stuck in my head… but if you can get a panosaurus for 85 I might just go see what that bad boy’s all about 😛

The parking garage rocks regardless, corsec67 🙂

To nobigdeal, I actually thought about posting that guide before the contest and tried my ass off, but I just didn’t get it done in time. It’s been sitting on notepad on my laptop for about 3 days now 😛 Between my day job running around China and Hong Kong, my night job of exploring Chinese food (and somehow losing weight, must be tapeworms?!) and my unbelievably harsh asian birdflu (not really, but good lord was I sick), I just didn’t get it done 🙁 Sorry… but I hope there are some points that are helpful! Better late than never…

OK, so in this thread the question of of aspect ratio came up twice with no answer given. There is no mention of aspect ratio in the rules. So why was my pic deleted for being “too square” when others , including one that was a true square, weren’t deleted? This is the second time that I had something removed that was allowed by another farker. I’m fine for rules, but arbitrary application is BS.

Can anyone give some CC on my Yosemite picture that might explain why it failed so hard?

Don’t know, I think that’s an incredible pic, I love natural scenes like that. One of those votes is from me 😉 The only thing I can think of after looking at it again, with the disclaimer that I am in no way a professional, is there there are not a lot of colors in there to attract the average farker. It doesn’t have the “oo, shiny!” factor. But this is fark we’re talking about, who knows.