Canon Rebel). What is the best way to take Panoramic Style photos?"> Canon Rebel). What is the best way to take Panoramic Style photos?"/>

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Photography Question 

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Panoramic Photos


I have a SLR (Canon Rebel). What is the best way to take Panoramic Style photos?


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0 July 25, 2001

 

Elaine S. Robbins 		  If you mean panoramic like some 35mm cameras take on a single frame, then, it doesn't really matter - all those cameras do is mask off the top and bottom of the frame. You can get the same effect taking a regular photo and then chopping strips off the top and bottom of an enlarged (maybe 5x7) print. Or you can shoot 5-10 pics moving along the horizon and then paste the images together in Photoshop or w/tape and trim it so the top and bottom are straight. Beyond that, I suppose there are really really fancy expensive lenses for 35mm SLRs that you can use to take "true" panoramics (a whole frame tall but wider than a normal frame).

Have fun!


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0 July 26, 2001

 

John A. Lind 		 
 
  Shift Lens Panoramic Experiment
Shift Lens Panoramic Experiment
An experiment making a short composite panoramic using a 35mm PC shift lens and using the full left shift and full right shift images for the composite.

John A. Lind

  
 
Elaine's right. I've done this with an 18mm super-wide, gotten an 8x12 print made and cropped it down to about 5x12 in size. However, this only gives a 90 degree horizontal angle of view.

I've also experimented with another method to create "composite" panoramics using a 35mm perspective correcting shift lens. It is shifted completely left for the one end of the photograph and then completely right for the other end. The two images must be "stitched" or spliced together as a composite. Carefully done from a sturdy, rigid tripod they are very precise and line up perfectly! However, they are not as wide as the first method produces. I've posted one of my experimental panoramics using the shift lens method. There's nothing special about the photo; it's purely an experiment with the method. A PC shift lens is very specialized, expensive, about half the cost of the Hasselblad X-Pan. (I use it for a lot of architectural and landscape photography, not panoramics.)

"True" panoramics are wider, over 100 degrees, and have a very immersive feeling to them. A true panoramic camera, such as the Hasslblad X-Pan is very expensive ($1700) and will use multiple film frames in a single continuous image. The film must be custom printed by a pro lab that can handle it.

-- John


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0 July 27, 2001

 

Ed McEwen 		  Adobe Photoshop Elements can be used to get the results you are looking for with little effort and the results are quite good.

Open Elements, click "File", photomerge,
within the next box you are asked to pick your photos... Choose 3, 4 , or however many you have. Each picture is set end to end. Then tell Elements for the advanced blending options and "Presto" the photos are blended together. Then click "OK" Now you can enhance, sharpen, resize as you wish.

Now you can save for the Web or for Printing. This is a pretty neat and easy to learn option to create panoramics.


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0 August 26, 2001

 

John A. Lind 		  PhotoShop is one method and from what I've seen done using it, works well.

The image posted was stitched together using PhotoVista, which is specialty software specifically for stitching panoramics together. It handles both composites like this one and multiple images from rotational panoramics up to a full 360 degrees.

-- John


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0 August 26, 2001

 

Tom Darmody 		 
 
  Tribute in Lights 2
Tribute in Lights 2
Panoramic of lower Manhattan from NJ

Tom Darmody

  
 
Photoshop and a 35mm camera with a 50mm lens is by far the best and cheapest way to do panoramics. Set up your camera on a tripod and take some overlapping frames, (for your first couple of attempts I'd suggest a subject that has a clear horizontal line that runs through the frames). Scan in the film. Make a new RGB image (height-what ever your scanned image is) length- the lenght of one fram x the number of frames, eg- your scanned images are 400x600ppi, so the height of your new image is going to be 400 and the length is going to be 1800. Paste each frame in the new image using a seperate layer for each frame. Then use the move tool to line up the horizontal line in each layer/frame, sometimes it's helpfull to add a guide line. Once you have the frames lined up flatten or merge the layers. Use the rubber stamp, healing brush to clean up any visible verticle lines on the edges of the frames. Then just adjust and crop as needed.


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0 June 05, 2002

 
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