Smoke over Zion at sunset

[bjnicholls]

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/panorama-stitching/files/BJ%27s%20Panos/Smoky-Zion-pano-1200.jpg

This image is a stitched panorama from four S2 photos, manual exposure with the 80-400 VR lens at about 100mm. Tripod used with VR turned off.

The smoke over the Zion National Park sandstone cliffs came from a range fire somewhere west.

[Jess]

Just Stunning....the colors are magical

[Swampy]

I agree. Great shots! Now, maybe this forum needs a section similar to the FAQ section where How to's are posted on how to possibly get your best shot(s) like this one. I notice on the left two pictures a slight difference in contrast/brightness than the two on the right.

This has always perplexed me when taking similar scenes. I've only tried to do one panorama and it was a quicky thing that didn't really need to be publishable, but I had different results for some pictures by a long shot. All the other ones I took, I didn't really have control over shutter speed and aperture.

Then I find out a few other trinkets to make a better panorama where focal length plays a big part. I shot one set at 24mm on my S2, I basically had to, tight quarters and all inside a room), but there were lines that there was no way to line them up in the stitching, so, what is the best focal length to use as a general guideline?

Another problem, tripod's. How to line them up? If you have two mechanisms for panning and tilting, this should be a no brainer, but what if you have a ball head in which it's kinda hard to just pan without tilting one way or another. For instance, I took two pictures of an 8 foot tall rack using only tilt to line up the shots, and the rack seemed to bulg toward me in the stitched final. How do you prevent that?

Should a wide angle set be done with 24 pictures and past only the middle sections of the pictures, or should more of a telephoto lens be used?

How about it? A section for how to help take particular pictures?

Bryan

[bjnicholls]

There are a couple of good panorama resources I can recommend...

This is a good guide to the technical aspects of panorama shooting:

http://www.htu.at/~sascha/ptguide/01.htm


One that focuses on PanoramaTools, a difficult tool to use without a helper application (PanoramaTools is freeware and very powerful). I use PTAssembler for difficult stitching projects (link is in the article:

http://epaperpress.com/pano/index.html


Here's good site that has reviews of many stitching programs along with hardware and technical information:

http://www.panoguide.com/


I stitched the above panorama just using Photoshop layers. I've found longer telephoto pans often work fine without using stitching tools that compensate for lens perspective. The wider the lens and the closer the foreground, the more likely you are to have parallax problems and you will need to use a stitching program to warp the images for stitching.

Use a tripod with a head that offers panning action. You need to level the tripod and then level the camera so the horizon remains level as you pan. I use a bubble level (made by Hama) in the camera's accessory shoe. The tripod has a level so I can level the panning action. I use a ballhead with a panning base and I haven't yet invested in a "nodal point" bracket that will prevent parallax problems.

Allow considerable overlap between the panning frames. This will allow you to stitch more easily and effectively. The contrast on the Zion image changes from one side to the other because of the point of view and the shadow directions. Set your exposure manually and make your frame sequence as quickly as you can so that the changing light and clouds doesn't cause you problems with stitching.

The full size stitched image above is 9x40 inches at 300 ppi, 94.5 megabytes at 8 bits formed from raw images 16 bit tiff conversions.

[Polarpics]

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