Marion's Pano

[the_camera_poser]

I've been using CS3 for stitching lately, and it wouldn't work for this series, so I switched to Hugin, a free program, and I'm pretty happy with it. Had to manually stitch it though, but it was worth it IMHO.

Totally frank and honest C&C welcome.

Taken from the top of Marion's look out, with a 30D and a 10-20 handheld.

[Nick S]

Love it.
did you crop any foreground? just wondering if more of that would balance it out a bit
I hope it's like this around the labyrinth in a weeks time..

yeah the lighter pic is better

[the_camera_poser]

Because of the curvature of the stitched final, I had to crop a bit of foreground. The picture in the post is very dark- odd, as the original is lighter. I'll repost it.

[corvus]

Oops !! ventured into the land of techno mystery !! just keep the good pics coming
c

[GerryDuke]

Beautiful TPC. I assume you took it this week end. I imagine it would all be coverd in snow today. Ben Lomond and Mt Barrow were covered today.

Gerry

[Clownfish]

Very impressive.

What did you use to do the stitching? I usually use Photoshop, being my program of choice, but I always have trouble with curvature/matching edges. I think the main problem is that my efforts so far have been entirely handheld. The GIGO principle and all that. I've just bought a mini-tripod, so I'll have a bit more control.

How much of an arc would you recommend taking for each pic?

Here's one of my efforts, from Quamby Bluff:

[tasadam]

OK. You wanted C&C so let's see what I can come up with.

It looks rubbish. The water's too dark, the bush in the foreground looks dead, the sky bits are too blue, there is way too much cloud in the sky to be taking photos, those people just don't look like they're enjoying themselves, need I go on?
And before anyone harps, yes I am crappin ya! (should be obvious).
(Oops, just read the bit about askin for totally frank and honest C&C)

Seriously now, a very nice image, one to be proud of, great colours and definition looks great, would love to see a larger version, only two things I would do differently -
1. Pehaps add some more foreground so the horizon is not in the middle (though as I say nothing wrong with it as is, just a different perspective), and
2. Use a Nikon

I hope it's like this around the labyrinth in a weeks time..

If it does, you're lost!

I should cut back on my coffee...

[Mickeymoo]

Great shot, there are some wonderful colours in there with parts of the fagus.

[the_camera_poser]

Clownfish- I've used a free program- I tried to do it with Photoshop CS3 (the easy way) and it didn't work, so I used Hugin 0.7 with the Enblend 3 plug-in. With Hugin, you have to choose your reference points (quite easy to do), and you basically do the stitching manually. But the results are generally pretty good, and it does seem to reduce some of the mismatching.

As for the shot itself- this time I used the camera on it's Av setting, but normally it's best to set it to Manual, and manually set the white balance, or shoot in RAW. Having said that, I left the white balance on Auto for this series, and it worked ok.

I do use a tripod for some panoramics, but this one was handheld. I just follow these guidelines:

-Make sure that each photo takes more of the foreground and sky than you'll want in the final, as you'll end up cropping
-Try to keep the horizon level for each photo (I use the AF points)
-I set the camera to manual focus, and then set the depth-of-field to infinity, sometimes.
-Keep the camera as close to one spot relative to the ground as you pivot, to reduce parallax error. This is better on a tripod.
-Overlap by 1/3in each photo.

As for angle to use, I don't think it matters. I would think that whatever lens and focal length has the lowest level of distortion would be best. This particular panoramic was taken with a Sigma 10-20, which has significant distortion, but it seemed to be ok. I normally use my 17-40 for this sort of thing, as it is the best lens I have for image quality, and it doesn't have a terribly large amount of distortion.

As for Noink, yeah, I could use one of those. But I do like a good photo. And you know, you do have to have a red ring around your lens to get good photos. (Well, expect for my Sigma 10-20......)

[Son of a Beach]

Hugin is great, and depending on which build you get, it can do it all for you automatically. However, having the option to do match points manually yourself is also useful on the rare occasions it can't figure it out for itself.