Comments on: Panorama Llama

By: alami m'hamed

alami m'hamed — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 09:58:55 +0000

Please what is the difference between Sigma 8mm and Peleng 8mm?
Best regards

By: Grundibular

Grundibular — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 12:04:02 +0000

Tripod with spirit level is a must for taking these shots. A panoramic head (to shift the lens back onto axis of rotation) can be useful, but so long as nothing important is closer than about three metres, it won’t be essential. 3d vista studio, is pretty handy for compiling, but can’t always deal with a succession of full res (at 6.3mp) images. Down-scaling a bit fixes things. Canon’s photostitch isn’t bad (especially as its free!). Pretty good results, quite quickly, but 3D vista gives more control.

By: Matt (brother)

Matt (brother) — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 00:35:21 +0000

I just made one from my Canon Powershot A75 digi cam. It has the function to take pano pictures, then it stiches em together at the end automatically. It’s pretty nifty, this cam rocks. You can upload wav files to it, loading screens etc etc..

Anyways, heres the pic it made:

http://www.neraweb.com/pano.jpg

By: Thomas

Thomas — Wed, 13 Oct 2004 16:19:44 +0000

As software I’m using PanoTools together with PTGui (or PTMac), shooting is done with a Canon 300D and a russian Peleng 8 mm fisheye, 6 shoots in portrait format, plus one shoot up and one shoot down to get a spherical or cubic panorama.
For the flash viewer you can try flashvr.de (not spherical)

By: richard

richard — Sat, 09 Oct 2004 16:15:50 +0000

for erik… those are some great panoramas on your site! thought you might enjoy taking a peek at a site here in SLO where local virtual tours are provided to local businesses. They’re doing quite well with it — http://www.virtualslo.com. Not quite as inspiring, but another useful application.

By: erik

erik — Sat, 09 Oct 2004 03:55:18 +0000

thanks — if there’s any more eriks that join in, we’ll need superscripts, or something. I’ve heard good things about PanoramaFactory but not tried it myself, as it doesn’t run on the Mac.

Oh, and the software I use is {Apple QTVR Authoring Studio, RealViz Stitcher} depending on the project.

erik

By: kartooner

kartooner — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 18:25:12 +0000

Just to update those who are following this discussion, per Erik's Virtual Parks site I was able to find a software title for Windows called Panorama Factory. It took me 15 minutes to take the photos and using Photoshop compress them from high-resolution to lower resolution. Then, it literally only took about 2-3 minutes total from start to finish to stitch the photos (using the built-in wizard) and output to both a jpeg and Quicktime VR file. The quality of the panoramic image is astounding. If you're in the market or have the interest to create panoramic images I highly recommend picking up Panorama Factory for $59.95. I've been researching various software to accomplish these images for the past couple of days and found what I was looking for. Now I'm hooked! Yet another passive hobby to add to the list.

By: kartooner

kartooner — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 13:55:16 +0000

Erik: Always good to hear from another Erik (since I share the same name and spelling as well). I appreciate you sharing your thoughts because I’ve never photographed panoramic shots professionally before, other than experimenting.

I’ll keep in mind to overlap at least 30–50%. My experiment yesterday turned out better than I had initially expected so I can only expect that with subsequent tests I’ll become more familiar with the process.

By the way, you’ve got an excellent site. Very resourceful and informative. I’ll be digging through it in the next few days.

By: erik

erik — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 13:33:01 +0000

I’ve shot over 3000 panoramas and almost all with 12–14 shots around. I just wanted to point out that in my experience, any time I’ve only had 15% overlap, it’s lead to problems, usually because the stitcher doesn’t have enough area to 1) match up details, or 2) average out differences in color and/or lighting between the two shots. I usually use anywhere from 33 to 50% overlap.

I gotta think that programming your own Flash viewer for panoramas (particularly ones shot with wide-angle lens) might be a multi-month programming project. There’s a lot of math involved. Check my weblog vrlog.com for mention of a Flash viewer you can buy (I have no connection with the product, but post VR news all the time).

Lastly, keeping the nodal point of the lens centered over the tripod is critical to getting the stitching to go smoothly. A “panhead” helps with this.

erik

By: david

david — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 10:39:58 +0000

i use some canon stitch software and get good results.

an important element to remember, is when setting up the camera to fix the exposure settings (shutter/aperture) throughout the 12+ shots, so exposure settings for each shot are consistent