Panorama

Some time in the near future - weather permitting! I'd like to try my hand at 360 degree panoramic photos. My questions are:

Is there an optimum focal length to use with the standard 18-55mm kit lens.

What ever that focal length may be, is there a formula to work out in degrees the angle/field of view so that I can work out the optimum number of overlapping photos to take which I will then process using Adobe elements 5.0.

Ta,
Chris

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Call me Chris
Pentax KM, P-30, MZ-50, K10D

I tend to use a 50mm lens, with the camera in portrait format, and just do the overlap by eye - i.e. if panning from left to right, note what's in view on the right hand side, and pan across making sure I can still see it on the left.

Longer lens means less distortion at the edges of the image so it's easier to match up with its neighbour. However, it will mean more images to cover the same field of view.

Here are a few examples, the first two took about 12-14 shots, and cover about 150 degrees. The third was with a zoom lens, I think set to about 35mm, five shots (the house does lean like that ).










Needless to say, this size doesn't do them justice. Top two are over 10,000 pixels wide, bottom one over 5,000 (49Mb file).

I merge them by hand - as long as the lighting stays constant, and you've got everything levelled up okay, it's not too time consuming, just eats up a lot of RAM.

Dan

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K-3, a macro lens and a DA*300mm...

Thanks for that Dan. Shortly after I posted my question, I realised that I should forget any formula and just give it a go by trial and error. However you did confirm something I suspected - that the equivalant to 50mm (film) would probably be the best focal length to use.
As soon as I have the opportunity I'm going to take the photo's and post them.

Chris.

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Call me Chris
Pentax KM, P-30, MZ-50, K10D

with my 18-55 I usually use 35mm for panos. The best lens I've ever had for panoramas though was my old Sigma made Zeiss Jenazoom 70-300 at 70mm. Distortion free, and the shots just slotted together.

One thing to remember, the more overlap you have, the easier it will be.

I generally end up with so much overlap that I could physically make the panorama omiting every second shot. Makes it a lot easier though.

I use Hugin to do the stitching. It's free to download, just google.

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you don't have to be mad to post here



but it does help

Sorry to Hijack the thread but it's a related question - anyone had a go with one of those special tripod heads that are designed for Pano's - the type where you set-up for the lens' nodal point?

Just wondering how easy they are to use or heavy to carry about? I'm starting to get tempted to lighten the weight of my camera bag and sell my 6x17 Med Format...

Cheers,

Will

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Spirit_of_will

Fan and user of quality Pentax Shiny Kit

WEBSITE www.willbartonphotography.com & www.inspiredlightimages.com

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I have a roll your own pano-head, none of the reasonably priced units were very good at all. It's pretty much an essential if you are shooting scenes containing objects close and far or if you are in confined spaces. The parallax error just becomes too great to compensate for in software (which is always a compromise).

Done well a multi-row stitched pano will better a 10"x8" sheet film image for resolution, the sky's the limit really (actually software is the biggest limitation but Hugin is excellent). I pretty much only use my 67 gear these days if it's a subject that I need to capture in one exposure.

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Rob Studdert
HURSTVILLE AUSTRALIA
http://home.swiftdsl.com.au/~distudio/publications/
Pentax user since 1986, PDMLer since 1998