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Tool of the Land - Landscape - part 3 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

by Mike McNamee Published 01/08/2015

The Software Solution
One thing that modern software provides, which has a bearing on lens choice, is the ability to stitch images. This has become trivially simple and very effective. Today's programs are smart enough to cope with more variation in alignment, you can correct distortion and unaligned horizons and, if needed, you can also bring HDR to bear on high-range shots. Whereas the software often used to crash when using Photomerge in Photoshop, today it rarely does (although it can still be an issue with lower power laptops). This stitching ability can be used to increase your field of view without the need to have a wide-angle lens.

The difference between a stitch and a straight shot should be relatively small if you use cylindrical geometry to your panorama assembly but even with other geometries and their loss of image, top and buttom, the latest Content Aware Fill can recover many situations. The shots and screen grabs show fields of view for a 14mm straight shot and a seven-image stitch with a 38mm focal length. Although perspective depends only upon viewing distance, the slight down-tilt of the 14mm lens has dramatically distorted the palms at the edges, even though the gazebo in the centre has retained the same perspective with the building on the horizon. The stitch is 13,800 pixels across, the 14mm single frame is 4,256 pixels, 34MB playing off 174MB. Had we done a two-row pan stitch then the file size would have been proportionately greater.

Panorama Gear
As we said earlier, Photoshop or Lightroom do a terrific job stitching images together these days but if you are chasing the ultimate in quality and the maximum file size, then some technology is going to be needed.

For hand holding, a grid on the viewfinder is useful if there is a horizon to track along. A rotating head will enable you to level things up and it's vital to be used with a tripod if many shots are to be stitched and particularly if you need to do any HDR work on your pan. For the ultimate ease of use you can go all the way up to the Gigapan systems which move the camera about in a highly organised way and also come with some of the best software around for grinding up the massive pan files.

People have been using larger and larger image counts to make their pans and the world record image has just been lifted to 70,000 images for a picture of Mont Blanc in the French Alps. This was made by in2white and can be seen at www.in2white.com. The claim is made for 70,000 images to deliver a 365 gigapixel image. A Canon 70D was used with a 400mm F2.8 lens and 2x extender. The shooting took 35 hours and the post production two months. We did some back-calculating to work out the frame count. The aspect ratio of the image is about 4:1 and so 550 columns by 130 rows would produce 70,000 frames. However, the field of view of an 800mm rig is 2.6° by 1.7°. With a 20% overlap this means that 175 frames in horizontal mode or 262 in vertical format would be needed to cover 360°. This suggests that there was more overlap or some HDR work done with the image shooting.

Regardless of just how it was done, the image itself is endlessly fascinating. Careful looking reveals a number of climbers and skiers in action, but one which took our fancy was a pair of climbers below the Aiguille du Midi who appear to be practising their crevasse rescue techniques. We think it was a practice because a video camera can be seen, set up a safe distance from the edge of the crevasse. To emphasise the scale of the image, we lost our bearings and it took a full hour to find the crevasse scene for the second time to make the screen grabs.

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