Panorama-Howto
Hier ein Fundstück aus den Weiten des Interwebs. Relativ gute Ratschläge wie man seine Panormas fotografieren und zusammenbasteln sollte. Nichts wirklich neues, aber eine ganz gute Referenz.
Anmerkung: Der Text ist schamlos kopiert von 4chan’s /p/, daher auch auf englisch.
OK heres a pretty big list of tips for making panoramics. These are all based on my experiences and I feel they produce the best panoramics.
Most importantly, when you take a pano, make sure there is a Foreground. Panoramics are not best used for taking pics of clouds or far away mountain ranges, they are best for very wide angle shots where the subject is close and large. If you don’t have a foreground, its probably not worth taking the picture. This is even more important with wider angle lenses.
Tripods are definitely not mandatory, Unless I state otherwise all my pictures are taken handheld. you don’t need a fancy technique for turning or anything, Just stand very straight in one spot and spin around taking pictures. Make sure you overlap a large portion of each picture (at least 30%) the more distortion your lens has (for example a fisheye lens) the more you need to overlap.
OVerlap Vertical as well ashorizontal pictures, Your sliver of a picture looks like crap on a monitor and its impossible to print properly. Solve this by layering vertical rows as well as horizontal ones. I find for 5 pictures wide, you should have 2 vertical rows. The Ideal ratio for a panoramic is 3:1, These print nicely on any size paper, (double it up and you are back to 3:2).
- HDR Panorama
- Tripod (No special panorama head), D200, Sigma 10-20mm @ 17mm, 18 pics (6x3), bracketed and combined to form an HDR by Vincent from 4chan
Technical stuff.
Meter manually, I can’t stress this enough. take a few pics to see what dynamic range you have to work with, and once you have checked the shadow and highlight areas of your pictures, pick the best exposure and set it to that. THEN focus manually, choose something close to the hyperfocal distance for best results. ALSO set the white balance manually, I have had to spend quite a bit of time (hours) trying to fix WB issues when I am too lazy to set this manually. And turn auto ISO off, it will fuck with you even in Manual.
Now when taking the pics, know what you plan on keeping in the picture, and make sure you go quite a bit past it in all directions (an extra picture on the edges can save you big time!). The output you get will need to be heavily cropped and you want to make sure you don’t fuck everything up by missing a vital part of the picture. I stitch on average 18 pictures per pano (6x3) However, I have done 50 and 70 picture panoramics in the past, And they work fine aswell. The program can handle it.
What I use and I find works best.
I often shoot very wide, like 10, 14 or 15mm (fisheye, all on a 1.5x crop). The wider the angle the more distances are exaggerated (just like the lens normally functions). I use a Sigma 10-20mm most of the time, which has distortion and sharpness issues at the corners. So I simply overlap more and they cease to be a problem. These panoramics usually range from 180-240 degree field of views, and about 70-90 degrees vertically (any more and PTGui has issues because it wants to warp the tops and bottoms into wider areas) However in the past I used to take a lot of pano’s at 20-28mm, which don’t give such a dramativc sense of depth, but are still good for capturing scenes in the 120-180degree arc range. Any more than 35mm and you are creating a lot of work for yourself (however my best pano is 74 pictures, taken at 36mm)
Software
PTgui, get it, its the only program that you can add control points afterwards, and it also has a better track record with me and gives you 2 important options when stitching pictures. When stitching the program will work wonders automatically if you overlapped properly. When you see the preview make sure you center the horizon by using the blue crosshairs to adjust the picture (Lots of clicking around when the picture is tilted!). Also there are 3 options for the perspective. the first NEVER use (rectangle). The Cylinder is great for stitching wide shots with or without high vertical arc’s, this does not correct for vertical blending and makes a taller picture than the Spherical option. The third option (sphere) also corrects for vertical distortion, and therefore functions as a tilt shift lens for correcting converging vertical lines. IT ALSO has the nasty habit of warping the top of your picture into a blurry mess when your vertical arc is too high. It also stretches pictures slightly wider.