Panoramic photography on the cheap! - Photography Help Blog by Pixelpix

My most recent blog entry.....

Tip 7: Panoramic photography on the cheap!
http://russellspixelpix.blogspot.com/2007/06/tip-7-panoramas-on-cheap.html

Here I show how I made a cheap and effective pano head and offer some
tips for shooting panoramic images.

I hope you will find it useful.

Cheers

Russell Stewart
http://blog.pixelpix.com.au
http://www.pixelpix.com.au/gallery
http://www.potd.com.au

 

Very nice write up, well worth a read.

thanks,

Scott

 

Yes, thanks, that's a good explanation & a clever device. I was just
discussing this with fellow photographers and your page made it more
clear to me.

BTW, my discussion was with a film shooter who wanted to make multiple
prints & simply lay them side by side. I think I was correct in saying
this simply will not work. For accurate results, software is needed to
undistort the geometry of each shot.

 

I have done many such film 'panos'. Yes, the geometry is better using a
good digital and panorama software, but the pictures laid side by side,
with careful overlapping can give a pretty good impression of a wide
scene. Much more dramatic than a single picture at a time.

 

It would work if he would paste them to the inside of a sphere.

If pasted to the outside of a sphere it might look like a
'fish-eye panorama' where the undistorted center moves with
the orientation of the sphere...

Internet rule #1: The answer to the question "Am I the only one?"
is always "No".


http://www.termespheres.com/store.html

 

An interesting method you have there. For my purposes though, I need
vertical as well as horizontal panning, and while your setup rotates
around the nodal point in a lateral pan, it does not allow this in a
vertical pan.

Colin D.

 

What do you use, Colin?

 

A vertical pan is not a problem if using a tripod that allows the
middle shaft to be removed and replaced in the horizontal position.
One of the Manfrotto 055 tripods does this.... my 055 is the model
under and does not, so I put a second tripod head on top of the other
and this gives me vertical pans around the nodal.

It also allows for severe off-level nodal rotation and with that some
wacko effects can be created... http://www.potd.com.au/gallery/albums/userpics/10002/WackoPano2.jpg

Cheers

Rusty

 

Hi Matt,
I manufactured a pano head from 12mm - about ½-inch - plywood, basically
along the lines of the Panosaurus, with a bubble level fixed to the
bottom piece of wood, a vertical piece fitted into a routered groove
spaced from the point of rotation to position the lens over the rotate
point of the tripod, and a plywood arm extending backwards from the
vertical panel to carry the camera in portrait orientation. This arm is
pivoted at the nodal point so the camera can swing vertically as well as
horizontally about the nodal point. The camera mounting screw is in an
adjustable slot so the camera can be moved forward or back a limited
amount to set the NP depending on the zoom setting. Not that there's a
lot of difference, since most of the time I am zoomed to about 60mm or
so. But lately I have photographed the front foyer and the lounge of a
large house, from ceiling to floor, three rows of six shots at 17mm,
which is why I need the vertical swing.

Imagine the Panosaurus made of plywood and you've got the idea. Cost of
manufacture about $5 for a bubble level and suitable bolts and wing
nuts, scrap plywood, $0. Time to make, about two to three hours.
Painted matt black, looks ok.

The first trap was not setting the tripod head level before leveling the
pan-tilt head, so I have to fit another bubble level to the tripod.

Colin D.

Colin D.

 

Good article Russell, thanks for that. Others like me who are starting
to develop an interest in this might also be interested in an article
on the subject that I stumbled upon last night on the Manfrotto site:

http://www.manfrotto.com/Jahia/site/manfrotto/pid/3491

Though I suspect that the equipment used in the latter article would
be... rather more wallet-shattering.

 

I think that some of the stitching programs have now superseded what's
been written - although that article is interesting.

 

Q. When you drilled your holes in the bracket from the hardware store
what type of fasteners did you use to attach the camera to the bracket
and the bracket to the rails?

 

It's just standard (3/8"?) threaded nuts & bolts. I've adapted an old
tripod with a wingnut & a board for a digital projector stand from
regular hardware store parts.

 

How so?

 

Bits like this -- "When the software tries to stitch the two shots
together, a blurring or ghosting will occur on the edges of the nearby
object as the software blends the object's shifting positions with the
background."

Using Adobe Elements, setting the camera on manual, etc - old hat!
Cameras and software have moved on.

This may have happened with older software and was noticeable. I would
at a guess in the last 8 mths two of the programs that I use don't show
this effect or is it my technique? Using stuff like "panofactory" ??
and another Arcsoft??, I think, supplied with Canon and Ricoh digital
cameras, with I have used in the past.

Even the new Photoshop CS3 Photomerge far out shines CS2 version. And I
updated my other stitching program at end of last year, both updates are
better and more accurate. You will find that as software develops, the
number of points with which they use to align the images has increased
significantly, 200 or more, where as the old ones were three.

You don't even have to orientate images, from Horizontal to vertical. I
took a series of 3x 18 vertical images in one 180 degrees shoot and the
thumbs were horizontal un orientated, the images were also out of order
and from all 3 series taken, selecting 54 images the the stitching
program corrected all of these and made one stitched and blended image.
Now thats not bad at all. BTW this was all hand held.

Someone did put up an image last year or more ?? of Circular Quay with I
think 60+ images stitched, horizontal and vertical coverage, this
covered from the OH to the bridge.

I have revisited some of my old panoramic images and they now just snap
into place seamlessly.

Its like I said interesting and but technically the software has moved
on rapidly, stitching and blending, taking over from the politically
correct technical aspects.

rm

 

Autostich is pretty amazing. You just throw it a set of images & it
figures out everything. Here's an example where it got seriously
confused though <grin>:
<http://www.edgehill.net/1/?SC=go.ph...hborhoods/2005-06-12-neighborhood&PG=1&PIC=3>
The previous frame is what I intended and I did than manually.

 

In my case the Oly rail cam with a standard bolt that you can see in
the pictures.... this would normally come from below and screw into
the camera base. I simply removed this and screwed in from the top to
hold the bracket. To attach the cam to the hardware's bracket, I
removed the wing-nutty bolt from an old manfrotto base plate that I
had laying around.

 

ah!.... you are quoting the manfroggo page... I was confused there for
a sec, as I thought you were quoting me.

Having said that, I do agree with the "a blurring or ghosting will
occur on the edges of the nearby object as the software blends the
object's shifting positions with the background."

New software like SmartBlend may be pretty good at looking for new
"matching" areas of the image to make transitions, but if a lax
technique is used at the time of capture, there may be no way of
avoiding at least some of the areas where parallax is an issue.

This won't be much of a problem with a more distant landscape and I am
sure most software will now throw them together seamlessly, but add a
few close foreground elements to the parallax equation and there is no
software that I have seen, that can make the right assumptions and
produce a seamless blend... IMO it is far better to produce perfectly
aligned nodally rotated images to begin with, than it is to rely on
some "code" to fix it later.

 

Yes - I was referring to the Manfrotto page.

Have a look at the video on Russell Browns site at an example what CS3
is doing - its interesting. Very different to CS2, which didn't blend,
using a 45 degree slice.

http://av.adobe.com/russellbrown/CS3PhotoMergeSM.mov

This has close elements.

Some software programmes do it differently and if I find one can't
handle it, then I run it through the other.

Technique is where you have an understanding of what's required so the
stitching program will work, this is not necessarily a nodally rotated
image.

 

It tends to do that sometimes. So I try another program.

I think the first result would have been the same even if you used the a
nodal point. the program has lost track of what's going on.

One image of the 'coast line' taken off a tripod setup on a focus rail,
(see I have tried that) about 20 plus images ended up in a horseshoe
shape. Ended up stitching about 5 at a time them, the resultant images
were then stitched, that worked.