Panos C&C

digitalage

Took these two panos on my lunch hour today.

Calina

Like the first one very much. Was it really that good in Dublin Port today? It's sort of grey and murky in north Co Dublin most of the day.

digitalage

There was a break in the weather, so I poped out of work to take some shots...was originally going to go to poolbeg lighthouse to do a pano but the wind was too bad, did'nt want my gear swept into the sea.

311

your dublin bay pano has hardly any distortion ,great work.
I like the idea of the second one.

Calina

Some of us spend loads of time on Dollymount in high winds. It's the rain which worries me more than anything...

m_stan

these are really nice. great job. particularly like the colours in the first one.

what were they taken with and what did you use to stitch them together ?

rymus

same question from me, what did you use to stitch them? I've tried a few bits and pieces but get inconsistent results.

Fenster

I'm not too keen on the first as I've done a fair bit of panoramic photos myself. You've zoomed out way too far (kit lens at 18mm at a guess?) and have no foreground interest to make up for it. Don't be afraid to zoom in or try a panorama on something that's up close to you. This and this are two recent panoramas I've done to give you an idea of both.

I like the second one a lot more, as I've never done a 360 degree panorama, I try to keep it below 160 degrees or so in all of mine, for the sake of trying to match what the eye might see.

Rymus, what are you using to stitch? It's tricksy at the best of times and 90% of a good panorama is done at the camera itself.

rymus

Tried arcsoft panorama maker 4 (which seemed to perform best for me), some freeware thing that took an age to render (even with 2gb ram) and a few more. Never got the hang of it in photoshop so went looking for easier and quicker ways to do it.

Fenster

Try Hugin, it's never yet failed me.

digitalage

Thanks for the critiques, I used the PTgui (http://www.ptgui.com/) to stitch to the phots together, I tried running them through Realviz Sticher 5.1 but there were alot off stitching errors. The shots were taken with a canon 16-35mm f2.8 lens, the first one was set at 27mm and the bridge shot set at 28mm. The two shots go to show that with lot of foreground in the photo the distortion is really pronounced weres if you cut out the foreground you hardly notice the distortion. I'm going to redo the bridge shot in the evening time as it would be alot more dramtic with lights, might also try this on the halpenny bridge.

Fenster

The distortion actually comes from your camera itself. You have to realise that you're projecting a 3D enviroment onto a 2D image, a process that causes a lot of distortions. In a normal camera its least pronounced in the centre, gradually increasing as you move outward. A fast way to see this is to open up two of the photos you used in Photshop, and paste one as a layer over the other. Drop the opacity a little and try and line them up.

If you want to avoid those distortions, you need to keep the camera as absolutely level as you can. If your camera is angled up, it will distort the bottom of a panorama, and vice versa. I can put up the uncropped versions of the two panoramas I linked to, when I get off work, to show you.

Hugh_C

Love the first one, the second one not as much. The sky is great on the first one, and the chimneys locate it very well. Have to disagree with the Fenster, I love the featureless foreground, it helps to frame the image imo. I've a bunch of stitches here, using Calico on Mac OSX. Takes forever to render them at full size though.

digitalage

Thanks Fenster but I understand how the distortion affects the shots, I do 360 panos all the time, its more to do with the focal length you are using and the distortion of that lens and also spinnig it around the nodal point of the lens does'nt help. These shots were taken with a kaidan panoramic head (qpu-2) on a gitzo 1300 series tripod with a gitzo 1321 base leveing base, basically having less foreground in your shot the distortion won't be as noticeable.

digitalage

hughchal some nice panos in your flickr, I find that PTgui rendering times are very quick compared to Realviz stitcher, I also render my images as .psd files so I can clean them up and remove problems such as moving cars, people, etc. Heres a handy tutorial if your interested http://stitcher.realviz.com/tutorials/html/photoshop.php.