I’ve been messing a bit with panoramas, mostly on my iPhone (I have a couple of apps which stitch pictures together with varying success). This has been an interest for while, but I’ve never got any good results due to parallax. I now have a panorama rig which holds the camera in the right place.

See some panoramas here (mostly taken with an iPhone)
http://www.worldofpaul.com/panoramas/

My test panorama of the back garden can be found here - my first with a proper rig, and the software I use to stitch them together on my Mac didn’t complain, and all the bits join properly. This one is a spot over cooked exposure wise.
http://www.worldofpaul.com/panoramas/garden.html

They look like fun, Paul.

I've got a couple of panos to stitch together I took at Corfe last week. It might be a while before they appear. To be truthful, mine aren't 360° ones.

The trick, which I haven’t got fully nailed yet, is to take an exposure for the whole panorama. I need to do more that spot metering.



Corfe for me was a wet and dreary end to a day. It was too vile weather wise to visit the castle. It was also not the village I remember from my childhood where there were proper shops - butcher, grocer, etc.. I have one picture of the place to prove I was there this time, and video of the steam train (we went to Swanage on it).

There is still a baker in the village. Sadly, I couldn't sample their wares as they don't take electronic payment.

They're really cool Paul!



I especially like this one, the quality is surprisingly good, and you can spin around without getting dizzy

What kind of special contraption do you need to do them? I'm presuming a bog standard tripod isn't good enough?

You can get reasonable results with just a standard video head tripod, but when you stitch images together, you will get alignment problems, especially on closer objects. I am using a tripod mount which rotates the lens around the “nodal point” - this removes all traces of parallax and things line up. Using this kind of apparatus, you get very good results - the stitching software doesn’t complain about poorly matching points in the image. It all seems to just work.

I have a Nodal Ninja - http://www.nodalninja.com/ - which holds the camera in such a way as to rotate the lens at the nodal point rather than the screw mount on the camera. The site explains the problem and the solution pretty well. Manfrotto make panoramic kit too - but they get very expensive very quickly. You could build your own if you are handy with a saw.

Next on the list - and this is some time away - is a lens with 180 degree field of view. I’m using a 10-22 wide angle lens set the the widest, and I need to take about 40 odd shots to get the coverage. A fish eye lens would mean I have to take 3 or 6, making the process much faster.

I used my Samsung compact stood on a beach and took around 14 photos. Then I let the free microsoft live photo thingy stitch it for me. (big version on my Flickr)

I was talking "photography" with a colleague last night, who seems to know more than a thing or two about the subject.

The subject of panoramas came up and he explained that he turns his camera end-on (portrait) and then takes his landscape pics to stitch together. He has to take more pictures, but the resulting picture is taller than it would be with the camera orientated in landscape. It's such a simple concept that would never have occurred to me- but then I've never stitched a picture before.

Your first panorama looks quite tall, Paul. Is that what you did there?

The one above (mine) was taken in landscape but not a single height (if that makes sense). Its 7 across by 2 down rather than just 7 taken in succession panning.

Here's a link to a pano over Corfe Castle.

I daren't post it here, cos it's quite large! Stitched from about eight images in Photoshop. Shot with a 10mm wide angle in portrait orientation without the aid of a tripod. I set the camera to manual focus and exposure so nothing changed as I panned past the sun.

Gibraltar



Los Gigantes - Tenerife

I clearly need to get in on this panorama business!

Amazing work guys n gals.

The first panoramas were taken with the iPhone in a portrait position. The Lyndhurst one was taken in landscape, but I took three rows and let some software on the phone stitch them.

The Nodal Ninja holds the camera in portrait mode, as do pretty much all panorama brackets.

It’s all jolly good fun. I did another today, but it’s still being processed (will post possibly tomorrow). I am finding that:

a) stitching the sky, even with clever software, can be a pain as a lot of the time there is nothing solid to stitch
b) you need to provide as much information to the software as possible to get proper joins
c) all of a sudden, your control points may just cause it all to click into place and you get something decent after a couple of hours of getting something trashy

It is all good fun. If I had a 180 degree fish eye lens, I’d have less problems, but as it stands, the 10-22mm lens seems to be going a stand up job. Today has been a day of experimenting - what is the minimum number of images needed to get a good result? I am getting mixed results.

The other wheeze I have found with the software I am using for stitching (PTGui) is that I can save a project as a template and then bring in a different set of images and apply the template. So time spent tuning one stitch could save time on future stitches when using the same number/sequence of shots.

Ah, I see that now, from your link to the nodal ninja site.

For those of you who like the mundane, check out this exciting bus stop/digger combo!

http://www.worldofpaul.com/panoramas/busstop.html

This one does full screen and has a nadir as well as a zenith, so you are in a full sphere!