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05/31/2006 12:46:31 PM · #676
Fracman raises a good point. Why don't we discuss panoramas? I would be willing to help out as well ;)
05/31/2006 02:03:30 PM · #677
Originally posted by Rikki:

Fracman raises a good point. Why don't we discuss panoramas? I would be willing to help out as well ;)

I think that panoramas are certainly a valid topic for landscape imaging but highly specialized.

Covering the compositional and sharpness issues for framing wide vistas might be a more logical starting point. Just how do you frame a wide vista? What about a main subject? What about foreground and background interest? Stuff like that.

Wide vistas tend to have a lot of fine detail like trees, brush and grass. Sharpening alone can make or break an image. I struggle with sharpening all the time and would like to explore that aspect of landscape photography more closely. It would be nice to have several good sharpening techniques to add to my bag of tricks.

Btw, the Mt St. Helens image I messed with earlier is part of a panorama set so I'm ready if we choose to go the panorama route. :)
05/31/2006 03:10:26 PM · #678
Originally posted by fracman:

I don't know if anyone else is interested, but I struggle with figuring out how to frame really wide vistas. I've played with stitched panoramas and am begining to play with my new wide-angle (18mm on a D50) lens, but haven't really gotten the hang of it yet. ...

The images I produced, however, make everything seem tiny.

I looked at your panos. I like FirePoint. Meteor Crater looks to be about a 500 degree pano. :)

You struggle with the same issues in panos I do, improperly matched boundaries that you have to mess with to fix and lighting changes in the blends. I know those problems so very well. LOL!

I think the issue with being "tiny" is partly a display illusion and partly an aspecting problem. Obviously, you actually have a lot more data detail in a pano than you get from a single frame and that will be even more pronounced when you compare a pano with a wide angle lense shot.

Your aspects are about 6:1, 8:1 and 14:1 in three of the panos. That is "skinny" so contributes to the illusion of being tiny when seen on monitors.

One way to get around that is to build panos that are closer to the standard aspect ratios like 3:2. That is something I have been experimenting with. The way to do that is to take panos with the camera in portrait orientation and include several horizontal rows to make the pano "taller". My goal in panos is as much to build a finely detailed high megapixel wall sized picture as it is to capture a wide vista. That might be different from what you want.

The web versions of most of my pano experiments are here:
Panorama Experiments
05/31/2006 03:19:31 PM · #679
I'm game for a panorama or wide angle discussion - it'd be really helpful!

05/31/2006 03:38:16 PM · #680
I think the wide panoramas display better in a gallery than on a computer screen. When you are in a gallery, you will step forward until you are close enough that the height is about "normal." At that distance you will be able to see the details and the scene will not look small. But you won't be able to take in the whole width except with your peripheral vision. To see the whole image you need to move along the image and take it in gradually.

You can, of course, display panos on the web in a size that fills the screen vertically and requires horizontal scrolling, but you lose the overview that you get from seeing the whole image with peripheral vision. It is not very satisfactory.

Steve is using multirow panos to get better image quality in prints that have a normal aspect ratio. This is something I'd like to do.

Here is a link to a non-landscape pano that I did a couple years ago. It was stitched from four separate images. I'll try to post a landscape pano tonight. (Yes, I did get better at stitching.)

--DanW
05/31/2006 04:10:10 PM · #681
For what it's worth, we may now display 800x800 images out of our portfolios. And of course our storage space is increased, so we can save them to a higher resolution. So this will help if we decide to go the pano route. However, I have zero experience with panos, though I'm something of an expert on ultra-wide-angle landscapes.

How should we deal with this? I'm willing to discuss the ins and outs of framing up extreme WA shots, but I need help for panos; have we got an accomplished pano-maker who can do a guest lecture and shepherd people for a week?

R.


05/31/2006 04:13:16 PM · #682
I can talk about merging techniques, bracketing, etc. I'm no expert but I will help out wherever I can ;)

Message edited by author 2006-05-31 16:13:43.
05/31/2006 05:52:58 PM · #683
Originally posted by Rikki:

I can talk about merging techniques, bracketing, etc. I'm no expert but I will help out wherever I can ;)

You gotta be better than me. Everytime I'm out on a date and talk about "merging techniques" I get slapped.

Oh, and I've tried out a couple stitching processes but am still undecided on which is best.
05/31/2006 06:03:57 PM · #684
Originally posted by Bear_Music:

However, I have zero experience with panos, though I'm something of an expert on ultra-wide-angle landscapes.

I still think composition and content are the most important aspects of wide landscapes. The issues are unique because of their "wideness". For example, trying to use the horizontal rule of thirds lines sure does leave you "flat". LOL!
05/31/2006 06:41:49 PM · #685
Before we get off this page, I think I've decided to use "Version 2" as my print image for now -- speak now, or forever hold your ... well, I guess you can leave out that last part : )

I think some of the blocking up of the shadows on the hills is the result of the noise-reduction operation, and not the Curves or Shadows adjustments. It gives it a bit of that watercolor painting look (which is OK), and I bet the effect will be mitigated when I print it on the Fuji Lustre paper, which has a slightly textured surface.

On that trip to the park I tried taking the same shot with both the normal lens and the wide-angle addition. I think the WA will let me crop to a 2:1 ratio but it will "seem wider."

I have stitchable pans too, and some Canon software which is supposed to work with them, but I've never tried it out ... you're not going to make me, are you?
05/31/2006 06:49:10 PM · #686
Originally posted by GeneralE:


I have stitchable pans too, and some Canon software which is supposed to work with them, but I've never tried it out ... you're not going to make me, are you?


We'll do the long route Paul but you're more than welcome to finally open your software package :P
05/31/2006 07:25:40 PM · #687
3:1 crop and (very sloppily!) hyper-processed! If there wasn't so much haze that you can't see anything (and that hill), this view includes three bridges.



Message edited by author 2006-05-31 19:26:34.
05/31/2006 09:27:40 PM · #688
I'm not sure how panos are going to move forward for me. All of the stitched shots were done with my little S110, and the pano taking left quite a bit to be desired. It was next to impossible to get consistant exposures across the whole series. Must admit, due to the interface on the camera, shooting panos in portrait mode never occurred to me. <gazes out window looking for big things to shoot>

DanW, how on _earth_ did you manage to get your model to sit still long enough to get three shots that lined up??? I tried a pano portrait of my wife, and I couldn't get anything to line up when I was done.

Framing/composition of ultrawides (is 18mm UW?) is definitely something I want to cover. So many of the locations look so great, but it seems to me that unless there are clouds in the sky, you either end up with 2/3 of the image blue or you end up with 2/3 of the image dirt. The "interesting" stuff is just a line across the middle.
05/31/2006 09:40:20 PM · #689
Speaking in conventional, 35mm film terms, "true" wide angle starts at about 28mm; anything more than that is "moderately WA" to "normal" and on up to "moderate tele" and "tele". Speaking of rectilinear (not fisheye) lenses, on these cameras 16mm or so is ultra wide angle, with an angular coverage of around 100 degrees.

On our Canon and Nikon APS-C sensor cameras, this means that 10mm (equiv 16mm) is ultra wide angle and 22mm (equiv 35mm) is moderate wide angle. So the Canon 10-22mm zoom, and its relatives from other manufacturers, covers the range from extreme WA to moderate WA and is an exceptionally useful landscape lens. A 17mm lens (equiv 27mm) on these cameras is a "true" WA lens, but not an especially wide one.

Of course, if you're shooting a Canon 5D or some other FF camera, then you'd use the straight 35mm lens syntax: ultra wide would be a 17mm, moderately wide anything more than 28mm...

Just to get the terminology organized :-)

Robt.

Message edited by author 2006-05-31 21:41:18.
05/31/2006 10:49:14 PM · #690
Originally posted by fracman:

DanW, how on _earth_ did you manage to get your model to sit still long enough to get three shots that lined up??? I tried a pano portrait of my wife, and I couldn't get anything to line up when I was done.

Sometimes you guys just make it too easy for a cheap joke.

For example, someone might be tempted to say that you should not have started with nude panos of your wife because camera shake causes problems.

Thank goodness I'm a classy guy who'd never say anything like that.
05/31/2006 10:50:53 PM · #691
Before you jump off into panos, here's a rather lame attempt at a different kind of landscape - used a centered horizon and I separated the sky and treated it by itself with a little color shifting just for fun. Still need to really sit down and go through Rikki's "Rikki'd" tutorial with a decent image.

05/31/2006 11:57:38 PM · #692
Originally posted by fracman:


DanW, how on _earth_ did you manage to get your model to sit still long enough to get three shots that lined up??? I tried a pano portrait of my wife, and I couldn't get anything to line up when I was done.


The model was pretty firmly positioned against the couch cushions. Also the transitions between the frames came at body points that tended not to move. But it did take quite a bit of work with photoshop to clean up the transitions--and there is still a bad glitch in one of the couch cushions. I was counting on you being sufficiently distracted not to notice.

This was one of those shoots where everything seemed to go wrong. The worst was that the tripod head broke off the tripod, sending my camera towards the floor. Fortunately, I caught it! I now have a much better tripod and a pano head that makes it easy to rotate around the optical center of the lens and provides click-stops for the individual shots.

--DanW

06/01/2006 12:14:01 AM · #693
Here is a real landscape panorama:



It was taken a year or so ago to show the flooding of the Ohio River. There is not supposed to be any water behind the line of trees on the opposite shore. I intended to go back later and take the same view with the water at normal levels, but I never got to it.

It is stitched from seven frames taken at about 15 degree intervals. I think it covers about a 120 degree view. The wall at the left and right sides of the image is one straight wall.

I used the stitching feature included with Photoshop (beginning with CS). It seems to work fairly well. Only very minor touch-up was necessary.

--DanW
06/01/2006 02:01:52 AM · #694
Originally posted by Melethia:

Before you jump off into panos, here's a rather lame attempt at a different kind of landscape - used a centered horizon and I separated the sky and treated it by itself with a little color shifting just for fun. Still need to really sit down and go through Rikki's "Rikki'd" tutorial with a decent image.



That's actually very nice. Good cropping! Good job altogether!

R.
06/01/2006 03:00:17 AM · #695
Questions:
What stitching methods have you used and how well do you think they work?
Anybody use commercial purchased stitching software?
Anyone have specific war stories they care to share?
How do you handle two common stitching problems described below?

In my experiments stitching together panoramas seems to have two main challenges:
1-The merge itself
2-Luminosity(brightness) blending

The merge not merging exactly is a problem you might expect. That is where things just don't fit correctly and requires some hand effort to fix. This can show up as fuzziness at the merge boundaries or edges that don't come together at the same place, like horizon lines not merging. Sometimes you can get clone-like duplications.

For whatever reasons even when white balance and all other camera settings are exactly the same the brightness of adjacent images are not necessarily the same and even when they are stitching software might not blend them correctly and leave uneven lighting.
06/01/2006 09:18:14 AM · #696
Well, I think that this picture from the Badlands would definitely qualify for a luminosity horror story :-)



I've had the merge problems too, but the images were sufficiently crappy that I didn't ever keep them. Really obvious stuff, like a model's hand being offset from her arm by several inches, stuff like that. Tough to compensate for that in PP.

Jon

Message edited by author 2006-11-14 15:51:21.
06/01/2006 09:49:33 AM · #697
Originally posted by fracman:

Well, I think that this picture from the Badlands would definitely qualify for a luminosity horror story :-)




This is very nice. I was also very pleased to be able to look at the full-size version of it. I have a BIG monitor so I was able to see about half of the full-size image at a time.

It seems that the sun was behind the clouds when syou started the series. After two shots, the sun came out. I don't think there is any way to correct a major change like this in Photoshop. You could adjust the image before the merge so that the brightness levels are much closer, but the differences in the presence of shadows will still be there.

I've made a mental note to compare lighting at the end of a series and to reshoot if it has changed.

--DanW
06/01/2006 09:59:07 AM · #698
Originally posted by Bear_Music:



That's actually very nice. Good cropping! Good job altogether!

R.


*blush* Thanks!!

I just wanted to get in an assignment, even if it was late and tried to cover two topics at once! But it was fun standing on the overpass and having folks look at me funny. :-)

Message edited by author 2006-06-01 12:09:44.
06/01/2006 10:19:18 AM · #699
Melethia, not to do to much "me2ing", but I also liked your shot. I was impressed with how much of a difference your cropping made and was rather astonished at both how much difference there was between the original and edited sky and at how "natural" your hyperprocessing looked.

Jon
06/01/2006 10:24:26 AM · #700
DanW, yup, that's exactly what happened. We drove up and it was raining. I started shooting in the clouds, and the wind picked up and just blew them all away.

I tried several panos at that location, all to no avail. The biggest problem I had to deal with was that once the clouds went away, the contrast range from ground to sky was so great that no matter where I started the pano, one part was so light or dark that you couldn't see any detail in it.

I did another pano on that trip from the Iowa border overlooking Nebraska. That one was more successful, albeit less interesting, both for the same reason: there simply isn't that much variation in Nebraska :-)
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