articles/Panoramas/panoramasmadeeasy-page3

GigPan Epic Pro - Panoramas made easy! - part 3 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

by Mike McNamee Published 01/08/2013

Your greatest enemies while making a pan are vibration due to shutter/mirror movement, slow damping of the system after moving the camera to a new position and wind. The latter is more critical because the rig is quite large and will catch any boisterous gusts, more especially if you are on a high platform. Removing camera straps, keeping the camera as low as possible and not stamping about on a platform all help a little. You may also control the mirror lock-up and dwell time.

Things To Watch For

If you are using a telephoto lens to pull in a wide cityscape then atmospheric dust is a real problem as it will significantly degrade the contrast. Flare an also be an issue with a 360° pan as the sun will be somewhere in the scene. You can overcome dynamic range issues because you can set up to shoot bracketed exposures and do some HDR. However, if you have a river scene with slow moving boats, or slow-moving traffic then these too can be a problem. We call them 'muggles' and you can take a policy decision to repair them using Photoshop or leave them in as curiosities. It is quite normal for moving pedestrians to appear several times. For boats on a river you can hit the pause button after the first shot and then wait for the vessel to clear the area before carrying on.

The Software

Shots made and assembled from a GigaPan are much more regularly spaced and well-ordered that other types of pans, especially compared with, say, hand-held camera shots. This appears to influence the ease and speed of assembling a stitched pan; it is hard to know without being familiar with the computer code, but presumably the software has less to do in terms of trying to find matches in the image content. How well a particular set of images will stitch together still seems to be something of a black art and the outcome is always in doubt until the final, compiled image appears. In the image shown the arches to the side walls of the church are incorrectly rendered in a 360° panorama. Despite this the GigaPan Stitch is one of the more reliable ones that we have tested, it certainly never did any of the really silly things other programs have managed such as placing building high in the skies.

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