360deg panoramas

[james_tye1]

<p>I've been asked by a client to produce some 360s of landscapes/street scenes for ipad ebooks. Does anyone have any experience? Is it an equipment or software issue? Can I use my D700 and a decent tripod and then use a package to stitch the shots together? Or is a fancy bit of kit needed. Any advice appreciated.</p>

[eric friedemann]

<p>James, you may want to clarify exactly what the client wants. A few years back, an editorial photographer friend was sent to Mexico with a specially-mounted 8mm Nikkor on a FF camera. He took one shot facing one direction and another shot facing in the exact oppoiste direction. He then took a 360 degree round of shots with a 50mm. His client also had him record ambient sound in, say, a produce market.</p>

<p>The client then had all the shots stitched together, including the two fisheye images, so you could "look" up and down and added the sound so you could hear the location. These scenes were then sold as CD/ROM travelogs.</p>

<p>Also, you'll likely need to use a panorama head. I've been very fond of my Nodal Ninja; the company is a pleasure to deal with:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.nodalninja.com/">http://www.nodalninja.com/</a></p>

[SCL]

<p>It depends on whether one wants interactive QTVR (virtual reality shots). There was a series done a couple of years ago at the Sydney Opera House, but I don't remember the photographer's name...I do remember he used a rather complicated motorized head for his camera (which was a rangefinder Leica) and stitched several hundred shots together. If you're unfamiliar with what I'm talking about, here's a link to one of the best QTVR examples I've seen recently, done by the NPS. http://www.nps.gov/features/grca/001/archeology/index.html</p>

[james_tye1]

Thanks for that Eric. I'll ask him to clarify. As far as I understand, he wants 360 deg horizontal panoramics so that the

viewer can drag the image left or right. I doubt he'll want to be able to navigate up and down as well. It sounds like a fiddly

job stitching a fish-eye image to a 50mm one. Assuming I won't need the 8mm, any idea how I'd stitch together the

images? Thanks for the advice on the head, I'll take a look.

[eric friedemann]

<p>Not to jump off topic, but on the subject of "complicated motorized" shooting, today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is killer:<br /> <br /> http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html<br /> <br /> James, for stitching, I've been using Photoshop's Photomerge, which makes it incredibly easy to do sophisticated panos. You might also want to read Bruce Dale's tutorial on panos:<br /> <br /> http://www.brucedale.com/tutorials/</p>

[JDMvW]

<p>Another vote for Photomerge in Photoshop. The better the components, the better the composite will be.</p>

<p>Of course, it can be hard to beat a quality panorama camera, but they are not cheap.</p>

<p>The Nikon head for panoramas is available on eBay if you keep your eye out:</p><div></div>

[photoprospect]

<p><strong>Hardware:</strong> while you can manage w/o, a pano head is highly recommended. Will save you a lot of trouble and decrease the chances os sloped (i.e. ruined) panos. At a minimum you'll need a rotating base - your ball head probably has that.</p>

<p><strong>Software:</strong> PTGui is what I use for stitching.</p>

<p><strong>Technique:</strong> Make sure to get some practice before leaving on assignment, but in short:</p>

<ul>

<li>Level the camera</li>

<li>Lock focus in manual</li>

<li>Lock exposure in manual (exposure varies wildly between frames in a pano)</li>

<li>Ensure 30% overlap between adjacent images (stitching software needs overlap)</li>

<li>Watch out for parallax - make sure there are no very close subjects</li>

<li>Beware of ghosts (things that move between frames and still stay in more than one frame, e.g. cars)</li>

</ul>

<p>Less critical, but still:</p>

<ul>

<li>Don't use polarizing filters (they cause dark spots in the sky in panos at 90 deg from the sun)</li>

<li>Shoot raw - or stitch real HDR pano (PTGui an do that)</li>

</ul>

<p>Regards,<br>

Jean</p>

 

[ilkka]

<p>Just to add a bit to the excellent advice above. Also lock white balance, ie select a preset, whether cloudy or sunny or custom. Just so that the camera does not start changing it for every frame. I would select a good quality jpeg as the image format. Of course raw can be used but it just adds another step and all images have to be processed the same. The wider the lens, the less images you need to stitch, but the lower the quality. Since the final image is for phone or iPad, the quality requirement is not that high. Whether or not you should use a pano head and adjust properly to pan around the lens nodal point depends on how close the closest parts of your image are. If you shoor far away landscapes or cityscapes it is not that critical, but if you include foreground interest it is next to impossible to get a good stitch unless you pan around the nodal point and this is difficult without a proper adjustable pano head. The Nikon platform shown in a post above does not meet this criteria. If you use one fixed focal length lens you can make a 'custom' bracket That moves the tripod screw close enough to under the lens nodal point and then any normal levelled tripod with pan control will do okay. Serious pano shooters like to turn the camera vertical to get more coverage but for this level of resolution it is not necessary and makes the whole process easier.</p>

[james_tye1]

<p>Thanks all very much, that's a great help. I'm pleased that I own all the software I need and I shall invest in a pano head. I'm still unsure which lens to use though, an 8mm will give me a spherical panoramic in just 4 or 5 shots but will I need to correct distortion? Would you recommend using a 14 or 17mm and shoot an extra row for top and bottom? Will photomerge be able to cope with this? I'll try some experiments this weekend.</p>

[photoprospect]

<p>PTGui can stitch multi-row panos.<br>

Here's an example of a <em>vertical</em> pano from <em>13 </em> (odd number of) images in two rows:<br>

<a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/110752296968089205692/SelectLandscapesImages#5662715224850505746">https://picasaweb.google.com/110752296968089205692/SelectLandscapesImages#5662715224850505746</a></p>

<p>Regards,<br>

Jean</p>

 

[ObiWon]

<p>Hi James,<br>

Sorry to be a bit late to this thread, but back when you posted the original request, what I knew about Panorama creation was a bit less that you did :-(<br>

But since then I have got hooked and I can tell you that the learning curve is quite steep really. Firstly let me blow away a few myths: you don't need a fish-eye lens, you don't need a Panorama head for a tripod and you don't need to buy expensive software! OK if you are wanting to create state of the art Panoramas then these tools are desirable. But to create a basic 360 degree Panorama then I have used a simple mono-pod, a Fujifilm L55 compact camera and some very sophisticated software that is in the public domain.<br>

So get yourself to the web and download a copy of some software called 'Hugin' This will stitch together professional quality panoramas given time and a bit of experimentation and learning. While you are at it download copies of Luminance HDR and RawTherapee not essential but good tools to manipulate images as a part of the creation process.<br>

There are some good tutorials on the Hugin website, but the best learning tool of all is to take a few shots and then stitch them into a Panorama. Start off with just three images and work on from there. If you want to look at the art of the possible then go to this site: www.360cities.org or you could try my Flickr site There are two types of Panorama photo there, the smaller ones in general are those created by my compact camera the Fujifilm L55, or the Hugin ones which are stitched from many images.<br>

Back in the dark ages I trained as a professional photographer and took panoramic landscapes for clients. These were stitched in the darkroom and seemed to take forever to create and were only B&W. Digital photography has made Panoramas and possibility for many people, in fact I plan to launch a business project in the next few months based on an idea I have for using Panorama photos in the commercial field.<br>

Best of luck<br>

Jim</p><div></div>

[simongallery]

<p>no personal experience using it, but a i have a buddy who said he was pleased with photoshop's photomerge. </p>