Help with Fisheye Stitching!

[Jetskiin4evr]

Alright, so I picked up my first Fisheye lens...the Nikkor 10.5! And I love it! However I was playing around and decided I would try the Fisheye Stitch. Pretty advanced to someone like me, but i thought I would give it a try. Bam! First photo came out flawless...Used Photoshop Elements to Stitch the two together in interactive mode and it looks acceptable to me. Pretty much happened by accident but the brick makes for an easy manual stitch.

During the same session I shot four more sets that I wanted to stich together but couldnt! The vingetting near the edges of the photo made it impossible to line up and stitch. (in this example the light post is bent and will not line up...of course this is because of the fisheye effect but is there a way to make it work?)

So here is my question...Is there a program or rule of thumb that I go by to ensure that my photos will line up when photographing something dynamic? (as in a structure or a person, but not the ground) Is this possible with Photoshop Elements or CS3?

Thank you for reading!

 

[Garbz]

There's a few things you need in order to make the perfect stitch. Some easier some harder.
Firstly and ideally set the camera to manual so both images have the same exposure where they meet, the bottom two are of different brightness from the looks of things.
Secondly you need something to align. Frankly I am impressed that a fisheye stitch works at all. The only process I could think of is to de-distort the image, align, stitch, and redistort it. Stitching is a process normally done using longer focal lengths, combining the image to make it appear as a shorter focal length.
The only rule to ensure things really do line up other than the distortion aspect is rotating the camera around the nodal point of the lens, rather than the sensor plane. This eliminates parallax error and is what hardcore panorama enthusiasts use Panoramic tripod heads for: Panoramic tripod head - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Everything else is up to the panorama software. Smartblend based apps like Autopano pro seem to do a good job when blending images with dynamic subjects. In one case it even went as far as eliminating a skier who would have otherwise ended up in the same panorama twice. But I don't think that program (or at least I haven't seen) has any method to work with the extreme distortions of a fisheye.