Stitching in the kitchen...

It rained this afternoon, so I tried some stitching using the Samyang 85mm at f/1.4 and the free Autostitch application.









The first one consists of about 20 shots on the 85mm, the second one used 35 shots. A single shot with that lens at that range gets just one of the bottles in, but of course has the depth-of-field given by the lens at f/1.4. The effect is that of a 20mm lens with an extremely wide aperture, perhaps much wider than f/1.4.

This was inspired by seeing a technique known as 'Bokeh Panoramas' but also named after Ryan Brenizer who has used it a lot for wedding photography. As I said, it was raining so the kitchen had to stand in as the test subject...

I found that Photoshop's Photomerge plugin can do these, but it simply fails to handle those images where nothing is sharp so you end up with a stitched image plus a few spare ones it doesn't know what to do with. It is hard to match those up with the stitched version.

Autostitch seems to have a different approach which mostly just works.

If you try it make sure that all the input images have the same focus, exposure and white balance, and that they all overlap sufficiently to have common features in the images. Lots of overlap is good, the stitching program sorts it all out. I exported the raw files to smallish jpegs to avoid the program having to work with too much image data, shooting small jpegs temporarily would probably have been less hassle.

The first image is terrific

I have the Samyang as well and have just started playing with it.

Did a little bit with differential focus, but still working on that.

You have convinced me to play with it even more

They look great, especially number 1. You've inspired me to give auto stitch a go

Excellent. I like the way the wine stands out. Nice to see some new world wine which is frowned upon in France.

What unusual shots. I do like the effect.

ok - I've had some of the wine and jolly nice it was too. Now I'll have a go at explaining it

That scene in the kitchen would have needed something like a 18 or 20mm lens from the position that I took it from. This would have given more or less the images that you saw, except that just about everything would have been in focus even with the lens wide-open.

To get the very restricted depth of field that I wanted (so that the bottles stood out in a 3D-like way) it needed a lens like a medium telephoto with a wide aperture - the Samyang 85mm lives on the camera at the moment and opens to f/1.4 so is ideal. Except that the field of view of the 85mm only gets one bottle into the shot. The kitchen isn't big enough to move back, and if I did the scene would have had a much flatter perspective. I wanted the more dramatic wide-angle look, but with telephoto depth-of-field.

That's where the stitching comes in. By taking a whole load of pictures from exactly the same position, with the focus set to the bottles, but spreading out the view to get many more bits of the scene in separate shots it is possible to get a wide view of the scene when all the shots are joined up. Just the same as with a normal panorama, but with many rows. Autostitch is an application that can take a selection of overlapping pictures and blend them together into one.

This is the view of the folder containing the 35 individual images for the vertical one:




You can also see the stitched version in its basic state, it then needs to be cropped before use. The raggedy edges are due to the rather freehand way the individual pictures are taken, in this case with the camera in portrait orientation and approximately 5 rows of about 7 pictures to give good overlaps. The first picture had some parts that didn't stitch due to only having out-of-focus areas in them, so for that one I ended up using only about 20 or so of the 30-40 I initially took. That one was originally nearly square but had some pieces missing in the top two rows so they got discarded.

I hope that gives people some ideas. It gets easier with practice!

*edit* I've just found one of the duds, it shows an uncropped version. I scrapped it because the focus was in the wrong place, but it shows the way the full image gets built up:

I saw this earlier today but had no time to comment - work getting in the way of life again *rolls eyes*.

I really love #1 - great idea perfectly implemented. And you had the patience to actually take and stitch those shots together. I have to do this occasionally in macro work and I'm now looking at multiple stills stitched into one 360 quicktime movie. It's a lot fo work so I applaud yo for your effort.