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Vertical Panorama

PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 9:50 am
by Rusty
I do a lot of panoramas but, only on rare occasions does it occur to me to shoot a vertical.
This is one of the nicest ones I have ever seen:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

As long exposures were probably required, I suspect some challenges were encountered.

Rusty

Re: Vertical Panorama

PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 9:52 am
by christell
Rusty, What a photo! thanks for posting this one.
Christell

Re: Vertical Panorama

PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 10:02 am
by Russinator
I have never thought of going vertical.

Maybe several of us can give it a try?

It would be interesting to see the results.

Re: Vertical Panorama

PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 1:33 pm
by bjt
Natonal Geographic's Top Ten Photos of the Year (2009) aired on the Dallas PBS last night. One of the photos featured was a vertical panorama of a 1500-year-old redwood. The program is excellent, with the featured photographers being interviewed. If you are interested in the hour-long program, you might check your PBS schedule.
Here is a link to the redwood photo http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/redwo ... fold-image
and a link to the other 9 http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/ ... hotography
(Unfortunately, they are small.)

Rusty, thanks for your info.

Re: Vertical Panorama

PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 1:43 pm
by suzib
That is truly a great shot!!

Re: Vertical Panorama

PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 1:56 pm
by Rusty
The biggest problem I see with vertical panos is changing perspective. If you start out reasonably close to the tree/tower/whatever, the change in vertical perspective from one image to the next is going to make it very difficult to stitch the images together.

What I find myself doing is getting as far back from the subject as I can and then using a tele lens to take a series of images. The plane of the film (sensor) in relation to the plane of the target doesn't change that much. Hence, very little change in vertical distortion.

One may ask, "Well, if you can get back far enough, just take one image and crop it. Right?"
Well, yeah, you can do that. But, when you crop, the resolution of the resulting image falls to the point that a good quality print is not likely. If you don't care about printing, don't bother with a panorama.

That tree is great, Betty. And, I'll guarantee you that a stitch of 84 individual images, I'm guessing each ten or so megapixels, produced a very, very sharp composite. Even looking at just a web image, you can see great detail.

Rusty

Re: Vertical Panorama

PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 2:35 pm
by bjt
just noticed that there is a video excerpt from the NG program regarding the equipment & processes involved:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/redwo ... fold-image -- look in the right column for the thumbnail titled video. There will be a short commercial first. The video can be opened into full screen.

Re: Vertical Panorama

PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 9:17 pm
by mtbspike
The APOD pic and the National Geographic pic are both wonderful. I don't think I've ever stitched together a vertical pano. I have however done narrow skinny crops before.

Russ, I like your suggestion of forum members giving it a try. I will give it some thought and see if I can think of a worthy subject available to me.

Courtney

Re: Vertical Panorama

PostPosted: Tue Mar 09, 2010 12:30 am
by geoff_chalcraft
I agree very much with Rusty - it's not easy to get an 'upright' panorama because of parallax and distortion problems..... unless your pano software (or careful preparation of the original shots) can take care of distortions (keystone effects).

Another 'angle' on this (and nothing to do with vertical panoramas) is to take just two or three shots in 'portrait' orientation, side by side. You end up with a shot in 'landscape' orientation that's got twice or three times your camera's normal resolution - so a 10Mp camera can make a 20 or 30Mp shot - then we're talking really top quality for printing, whether at home or commercially.

BTW, you'll probably all be aware of making sure you don't shoot in an 'Auto' mode - the camera will try to make appropriate (but different) exposures depending on what it sees for each part of the image, but you want just one EV - not a chequer board effect. One thing often forgotten, though, is to use a 'fixed' White Balance - or the camera will make its own decisions on that too and in many cases get it wrong. So....... Manual Mode, fixed WB, not a wide-angle lens (and a telephoto isn't ideal either) - and plenty of overlap between shots. In a 'normal' panorama - i.e. a scene captured horizontally - make sure the camera is set level - not aiming up or down - or you'll end up having to crop top and bottom and leave just a very thin slice.

Re: Vertical Panorama

PostPosted: Tue Mar 09, 2010 6:10 pm
by Rusty
We had heavy fog around the lakefront today; I went down just to play. Never had much luck with 'fog shots'. Didn't do anything that special today either but decided I would do a vertical panorama at the (old) fancy stone water tower.
DSC_7791-92.jpg
DSC_7791-92.jpg (116.24 KiB) Viewed 2669 times

Two images: 1/125th, f/11, manual everything.

Rusty