First attempt with stitched Panorama

[Aanything]

I rarely take panoramic pics with manual lenses, I'm too lazy to bring a tripod most of the times, and when needed my camera has a very nice auto panorama function that works great with auto lenses - less so with manual ones because it insists to automatically set aperture.
Yesterday I was driving around the hills here, and tried to capture the view from this spot.

The pano is from 12 shots, stitched with photoshop, taken with a Kaleinar 5 2.8/100.
It should have been a bit wider, especially on the top end, but my handheld rotation wasn't extremely linear, so it had to be cropped a bit.
I ended up with a 15000*5500 pixel image, and I'm quite happy with it - except a little bit of halo that came out during processing along one of the hills, and composition that could have been more similar to what I wanted if I had a tripod with me.

Here's a resized version of it:


C&C welcome.

[Aanything]

and here's a 100% crop from the original file:

[philslizzy]

I love panos. This is great.

I like taking the picture with a longer lens and when stitched you can zoom in and look at more detail than with a normal wide shot. Keep it up.

What software do you use?

[Aanything]

[philslizzy]

I started with that but got some weird results. Autopano Giga is good. Not too expensive and has a decent trial period if you wish to try it.

[Rick1779]

[miran]

Very nice.

I like stitched panos too but find it difficult to get the composition right. Often I'd make a big panorama with lots of individual frames but then end up cropping it so heavily I could have easily done it with just a single frame and a wide lens. I don't do the long lens pano with lots of detail but rather use a wider lens and cover more ground, over 180 degrees, sometimes all the way around 360. But when you start doing that, you need better software. I use Hugin, it's very good and free.

Here's one of my attempts stiched with Hugin: click.

[Aanything]

Thanks guys, I'll give those softwares a try - I'm particularly interested in the free one: having to keep an almost up to date adobe creative suite for work, especially now with the creative cloud thing, makes me strongly lean towards free stuff.

[philslizzy]

I got into panos when I started using a 50mm prime on my Nikon. Equal to about 75mm it wasn't wide enough but taking four photos in the vertical format and stitching them together as a panorama gave me a nice wide photo just like a 28mm lens. And zoomable detail.

About half the pics taken these days are for panos.

I have a photo taken in Scotland of a castle on a loch. The castle is on the left and 160 degrees round on the other side is s crofters cottage. With a lovely landscape between. It has been printed and is about 1.8 metres long and 30cm high plus frame. It's a real conversation piece.

[iangreenhalgh1]

Looks good to me, well done, much better than my early attempts! I particularly like the composition and the sense of depth created by the atmospheric haze.

I do a lot of stitched pano work and have had several printed for customers, I found 50mp is ample to produce a sharp print 40cm high and 1.2-1.5m wide.

For mountain scenes like this I like to use a longer lens, 135mm usually, or longer if the mountains are more distant. You can easily end up with a 140-150mp file that way though, which is great, but overkill really.

Here's a couple of my recent efforts:

Here's a 168mp shot of a railway viaduct I did with my NEX-3 and Fujinon-TV 1.8/75:



This one is 149mp, I used my Konica Zoom-Hexanon UC 4/80-200 at the 80mm setting:



Honestly, the level of detail with these huge files is beyond what you need for a big print, unless you're getting it printed 1m x 3-4m. Besides, people aren't going to stick their nose right upto one of these big prints to count the rivets, they stand well back to take in the whole frame.



I use a tripod for all of mine, because I much prefer using a tripod, I'm wierd that way, I do 80-90% of my shooting with a tripod, whether it's hdr, pano or otherwise, I just prefer a tripod. I use Photoshop CS5 to stitch, works great for me. I have used others, but find CS5 more than adequate.

[Aanything]

[iangreenhalgh1]

Thanks for the kind words.

I agree about panos, they open up all kinds of new possibilities and do look great printed big on the wall.

Look forward to seeing some more from you, now you've caught the bug!