Panorama Category

[Abel]

Please browse through all of the photos located in the PANORAMA section listed below:

The Panorama entries are located in THIS THREAD...


Once you find your favorite 3 photographs in that section, cast your vote for them here on the POLL located within this thread. Match the image name with the correct Poll option and check the appropriate boxes.


Voting Rules:
1. Members as of 12-31-08 are the only ones eligible to vote.
2.Voting will end on January 26th @ 9:00pm CST
3. You can not vote on your own entry.
4. Users are only allowed to vote for 3 photos per category. If you vote for more than 3 photos in a single category, all votes in that category will be null and void.
5. Any members trying to pad their vote count with bogus accounts and/or recruiting other members to vote for their photo will be disqualified from this contest and any future contests. So in other words.... Play Fair.

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And the winner is:


Photographer: Jeff Kohn
Username: JeffKohn
Join Date: 1-11-2005

[Texentric]

Wow, funny how everyone seems to like this place, huh Jeff? Congratulations.

[Spoony]

That is a great pano....I have dabbled with panos but still haven't been able to do a truely seemless one yet. Is there a trick? I use a "standard" tripod...I have read and seen tripods that are specifically for panos, is this something I need to get or do I just need to get use to mine?

Thanks and congratulations it looks awesome.

[jeffkohn]

Thanks guys.

Shawn, to answer you question this particular image was shot with a tilt/shift lens. Instead of rotating the camera between shots, I shifted the lens. Then I used the "reposition images" option in Photoshop's Photomerge plugin. I call this a "flat" stitch since it's not put together the same way as a traditional pano.

When using a regular lens and rotating a camera, you don't necessarily need any special gear but it can be helpful. You want to get the tripod as level as possible, so that when you rotate the camera the images don't end up slanting down in one direction or the other. Having a leveling base on your tripod can make this easier, but you can also accomplish the same thing by adjusting the legs to get things as level as possible.

If the scene you're shooting has both foreground and distant objects, parallax errors can be a problem. The fix for this does require some special gear, you basically need some sort of rail or clamp that allows you to rotate the camera on the same axis as the entrance pupil of the lens. Today's software is getting pretty good at correcting parallax errors when there's enough overlap; but avoiding it in the first place gives you a better chance of getting a clean stitch.

Really Right Stuff makes some specialized pano gear that can address this as well as making multi-row panos easier to shoot. Another option is the Nodal Ninja. But I wouldn't worry about specialized gear at first; depending on what you shoot it may not be necessary. You can always upgrade later if you feel the need.

Make sure when you rotate the camera you have plenty of overlap between shots, the more overlap you have, the more room the stitching software has to fix any problems along the seams.

As far as software goes, there are lots of options, and they keep getting better and better with each new version. Photoshop CS3 and CS4 have gotten much better at stitching, although they still lack the flexibility and control that some of the dedicated programs have. There are lots of standalone programs that are very good at stitching. Autopano Pro and PTGui are two of the most popular. Hugin is a popular alternative that is open source and free of charge. PTAssembler is also pretty popular, and is more affordable than some of the other commercial programs. There may be others, but those four are the most popular.

[Spoony]

Jeff,
Thanks for the very informative reply. Maybe you can answer a question on a totally different topic. That is I shoot Canon and have a small variety of lenses and my most used mainly indoors and low lighting situations is my f2.8 16-35mm and 70-200mm. I like to think my niche is action sports and this last month I shot some young boys basketball indoors under rather poor lighting. The teams main color is black with red numbers, I have discovered that my AF has very hard time focusing on the darker colors especially blacks. Is this my imagination or what? And also when shooting groups such as teams is there a trick to get everyone in focus when not using a tripod. The reason I ask this is when I shoot in A-DEP mode without a tripod in gyms the shutter is too slow to without tripod and wind up shooting in manual or another setting and I don't feel I get the possible photo. I am sorry to ask such dumb questions but I want to learn as much as I can in order to become the best photog possible for myself.

Thanks for your comments,

[jeffkohn]

I'm probably not the best person to ask about Canon-specific stuff since I shoot Nikon. You might get better info by starting a new topic in the Equipment forum. I will say that focusing in low-light tends to be more difficult, especially with the consumer and prosumer models that don't have as sophisticated AF modules as the top of the line pro models.