Panoramic photography without panoramic head

[nehas8]

Hi, I don't think you need the pano-head. Of-course it will make your task easier, but its not absolutely necessary.
You can check this tutorial on panoramic photography: Panoramic Photography - Tutorial to Capture the Perfect Panorama
The author has shot almost all his shots, handheld!

 

[epatsellis]

There are less expensive alternatives, from nodal slides for $100 or less. The point is that while the software is good enough if everything works well, when it doesn't it really sucks. By shooting a more structured, consistent approach the success rate increases significantly.

I suppose it just depends on how serious OP is about this, and how much accuracy they really need. I can't personally think why I would ever need or want a gigapixel photo, let alone many, many, many of them - enough to justify a $900 head so that they'll be *perfect*, but that's just me. OP may have that need, but it didn't read that way to me.

By the way, I haven't seen it "really sucking" since about CS2, as long as a decent amount of care with exposure, lens choice (chill on the distortion) and overlap were done - no additional hardware needed, as many in the thread have also intoned.

While I prefer to shoot architecture with a view camera and a Dicomed scanback, there are times when due to motion, wind, etc it's impractical or outright impossible. Clients could care less about any reason why you can't, only that you didn't deliver. I don't shoot gigapixel images, per se, but high resolution images for wide format output. I have other options available, but at times, the stitched approach makes sense. My typical job is 8-10 delivered 40" wide prints, with an dozen or so additonal views and detail shots on disc.

There are significant advantages, from a software standpoint, to shooting a structured image. Autopano giga does a wonderful job stitching, as does Microsoft's ICE and others. While some may scoff at saving 20 to 45 mins per image, when you have to deliver a dozen or more images, that time adds up quick.

Remember there are some on here that actually do this for a living, not just a hobby.

 

[Buckster]

There are less expensive alternatives, from nodal slides for $100 or less. The point is that while the software is good enough if everything works well, when it doesn't it really sucks. By shooting a more structured, consistent approach the success rate increases significantly.

I suppose it just depends on how serious OP is about this, and how much accuracy they really need. I can't personally think why I would ever need or want a gigapixel photo, let alone many, many, many of them - enough to justify a $900 head so that they'll be *perfect*, but that's just me. OP may have that need, but it didn't read that way to me.

By the way, I haven't seen it "really sucking" since about CS2, as long as a decent amount of care with exposure, lens choice (chill on the distortion) and overlap were done - no additional hardware needed, as many in the thread have also intoned.

While I prefer to shoot architecture with a view camera and a Dicomed scanback, there are times when due to motion, wind, etc it's impractical or outright impossible. Clients could care less about any reason why you can't, only that you didn't deliver. I don't shoot gigapixel images, per se, but high resolution images for wide format output. I have other options available, but at times, the stitched approach makes sense. My typical job is 8-10 delivered 40" wide prints, with an dozen or so additonal views and detail shots on disc.

There are significant advantages, from a software standpoint, to shooting a structured image. Autopano giga does a wonderful job stitching, as does Microsoft's ICE and others. While some may scoff at saving 20 to 45 mins per image, when you have to deliver a dozen or more images, that time adds up quick.

Remember there are some on here that actually do this for a living, not just a hobby.

That's a good point, and you obviously have a need for the best means of producing the best quality.

Again, I think the proper advice for the OP depends on what the OP needs in that regard.

 

[MetroRuss]

The principles are quite simple. If you don't rotate your lens around the nodal point you end up with parallax error. That is objects that are in the foreground suddenly appear to be in a different spot than objects located in the background. The other issue is lens distortion, because even if you correct for parallax with the correct tripod if you use many of the lenses available you'll end up with barrel or pincushion distortion. Both of these mean your images won't line up.

How field relevant this is depends on your software and the extent of the problems. I show you an example below. In this case I said "Nodal point? I spit on your nodal point!!!" I actually rotated my body shooting handheld. The nodal point was about 25cm behind where it is, and not the 3-6cm a tripod will put you out by.

Here's the result:

Ok I lied. That's not the result it's an interim stack. It shows just how bad the parallax error was in this case. Notice the background is completely unaffected, but the poser in the foreground was made somewhat less pretty?

Well after simply hitting "render" on the software. I get the following result: (I lied again, this result was after a bit of colour correction in photoshop too):

What is actually scary is that this was a 100% perfect stitch when I was done. I did not find a single stitch mark. A few weeks later I shot something from a long way away with zero parallax and there were some frames I simply could not correct for some reason and ended up manually aligning things in Photoshop, which is also an option if your rendering software can't figure out who's supposed to be where in the frame.

The results on the 2nd image are sexy. Could you kindly point.me in the right direction to research how you did what you did. I am using PScs5
Thanks for any tips!!

 

[Garbz]

I'm not sure how well modern photoshop handles panoramas. My last attempt with it was back when it first had the feature and I quickly abandoned it. The software I use is called AutoPano Pro and is a feature rich panorama rendering program. For the most part all I really did was point it to a directory of the daily shoot, it found all my panoramas and created them, and in some cases it was as simple as hitting render, and in other cases I did a minor amount of adjustment to the horizon and level before hitting render.

In photoshop in the above image I increased contrast, then reduced brightness with a gradient mask applied to the sky, bumped up the saturation, and reduced the green channel.

Anyway head to Autopano Pro | Panorama software for Windows, Mac, Linux | Kolor and check out the trial to see if it's worthwhile over photoshop.

 

[MetroRuss]

I'm not sure how well modern photoshop handles panoramas. My last attempt with it was back when it first had the feature and I quickly abandoned it. The software I use is called AutoPano Pro and is a feature rich panorama rendering program. For the most part all I really did was point it to a directory of the daily shoot, it found all my panoramas and created them, and in some cases it was as simple as hitting render, and in other cases I did a minor amount of adjustment to the horizon and level before hitting render.

In photoshop in the above image I increased contrast, then reduced brightness with a gradient mask applied to the sky, bumped up the saturation, and reduced the green channel.

Anyway head to Autopano Pro | Panorama software for Windows, Mac, Linux | Kolor and check out the trial to see if it's worthwhile over photoshop.

Hi garbz

Thanks for the reply.
Yes! I have been researching autopano giga and panotour pro. Im a newb photographer looking to get into the panorama market as a vr website builder and panotour vr provider.

I've been testing the autopano and the rendering is way faster than my cs5. I fell asleep while waiting for cs5 to stitch a 90 image 360 so i could compare it to ap.

Do you have a gallery to share id love to see your work.

 

[Garbz]

I have an older gallery at Auer & Garbz Photography Hasn't been updated in years and since the last server upgrade it's been throwing a lot of PHP errors.

My new gallery isn't ready for public consumption yet. A few HTML bugs still, however PM sent

 

[ChefAlex]

Hi, my first post here but I have never used a pano head before and the results are just fine

 

[skieur]

Use a Sony and do panos handheld and in camera, or do a high speed bracket handheld and batch stitch them together in Paintshop Pro X5 Ultimate.