Stitching panos - poor man's 10-22mm/fisheye?

[Dan Robinson]

I've been playing around with panorama stitching for a while and have discovered I can get results comparable to a wider-angle lens - even fisheye width - by stitching images shot with a more typical lower-cost lens (I have an 18-55). The capabilities of stitching software like PTGui are very impressive. What's more, the final image resolution is far larger than that of a single frame shot with a wider lens.

I was curious of any of you that own wider lenses have tried this in the storm environment and have compared results with stiched images. Obviously there are limitations with fast moving/dynamic subjects like close tornadoes, but I can't see why this would be a hurdle for most other scenes.

 

[Joe beier]

Only thing I have ever used was the one that comes with vista. Didn't like it too much because, yes, it might be a very wide pano but it's as tall as a number 2 pencil.

edit: figured i would post an example ... cuts out the sky and the ground in front but keeps a sliver of everything in the middle

 

[Mike Deep]

CS4's photomerge has really been impressing me lately. I've been going back and stitching things I previously couldn't.

San Antonio, TX @ 200mm. Click for larger version.

(The original size of this image was 24681x1994)

Sunset with cloud bands from TS Hanna on the opposite coast.

Thunderstorm at sunset. Previously I stitched this by hand into a spherical projection: See here.

These last two were hand-stitched.

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

I've been playing around with panorama stitching for a while and have discovered I can get results comparable to a wider-angle lens - even fisheye width - by stitching images shot with a more typical lower-cost lens (I have an 18-55). The capabilities of stitching software like PTGui are very impressive. What's more, the final image resolution is far larger than that of a single frame shot with a wider lens.

I was curious of any of you that own wider lenses have tried this in the storm environment and have compared results with stiched images. Obviously there are limitations with fast moving/dynamic subjects like close tornadoes, but I can't see why this would be a hurdle for most other scenes.

It's funny you should mention this -- I just did some experimenting this past June on the supercell (that later went LP) near DDC.

The upside to pano stitching is just what you say -- waaay higher resolution. The downside is that for whatever reason, wide angle lenses seem to control distortion better. Or, I should say, I'm not smart enough yet to figure out how to mimic the wide angle rectilinear distortion via the pano tools that I'm using -- and if you try to bite off a really wide field of view with a panorama by stacking rows of shots on top of each other or by shooting the pano really wide, you end up with some serious distortion if you want to display the image on a flat computer screen in a traditional manner. It's the same problem you get if you try to unfurl a globe into a map -- as you pan around, you're panning through a sphere, but rendering to a flat projection. Lenses handle this pretty well... me, well, not so much.

Anyhow, here's a quick comparison of the same storm, One is a pano stitch using a 22mm lens shot in vertical orientation (using no tripod -- all handheld) on a 1.6x crop camera in a single row, around 10 images stitched together with Photoshop CS4. The other two were shot using a single image taken by a 10mm lens on a 1.6x crop camera (one horizontal, one vertical). All shot (I think) at f/8, 1/100th, ISO 100. The single images have dimensions (in the original -- these are scaled down) of around 15 megapixels, or 4752pixels by 3168pixels. The panorama is 9835pixels by 5665pixels in the original.

10mm horizontal:



10 mm vertical:



Panoramic stitch:

(Note: IMAGE IS TOO LARGE TO DISPLAY ON STORMTRACK. CLICK IMAGE BELOW TO ENLARGE.)