Everything Else

Since there was a request, here's a preview of the latest one (getting late and I can't twiddle more. The alignment is still slightly off and it's not quite centered to my liking). I didn't check the camera mount before going downstairs and it seems I didn't get it straight.

Haha. Man, that's so weird, makes your head spinn a little. I LOVE it! Moar please


Cheers!

/Jonas

more^2

Very cool picture, please show more.

I presume this is a Fisheye in action? I've got one myself and it became my favourite wide angle lens in no time.

christmassy loop :)

how's the weather up there duck? give us a pan shot with your funky bike somewhere inside the frame, it'd add some interesting contrast to the grey sky.

It's pretty snowy, the pink bike with 23mm tires might not be a clever move

I've been planning on doing something fun at the (disused, no trains stop here anymore--it's just the ones to the paper factory carrying wood) train station so there might be something for when I get some time off work...



No, it's not fisheye. You might note from the image that you can see all four walls, the floor and the ceiling. It's a 360x180 degree panorama stitched from 24 photos in what's called stereographic projection, i.e. the "bottom" is in the middle and the "sky" is in a circle around the corners (you can adjust the centerpoint of course, this one is not fully 360 degrees but IIRC 291 degrees, so you don't see exactly everything but it's just a tiny circle that is outside view that would be stretched out so large that the middle bits wouldn't be visible. Wikipedia can explain it better I'm sure )

The lens I use is a manual-only Samyang 14mm f/2.8 mostly so I won't have to shoot 50+ photos for one panorama and deal with gigapixel results. I recently got a special tripod head that lets you rotate the lens around the "nodal point" or entrance pupil of the lens making parallax errors go away. This helps stitching and gives you the bonus of being able to get really close to things, the bannisters were something like 20cm from the camera in the picture (got pretty cramped trying to stay out of view, I managed to shoot my own feet in the nadir picture[1] )

You could use a fisheye lens to take panoramas like this, and many use 180° lenses to just take five photos and be done with it; but I think you'll end up making yourself a disfavor because of the severe distortion in fisheye lenses losing too much resolution and getting nasty stretching. Perhaps for fancy-pants medium format digital backs.

Appended a panorama I took to demo the tripod head to a friend because of the interest you've shown. I fumbled terribly while doing it, talking more than focusing on doing it right so the top row of photos were too high and I moved the tripod too short a distance which gave gaps in the center... Turned out pretty nice anyway, my friend photshopped the mistakes away

Anyway, I'll stop the insomniac rambling right here

Edit: Lookit illustration! Gosh I need some sleep.

[1] nadir picture is a picture you take straight down after shooting all of the other pictures to be able to mask out the tripod

Out of curiosity, on which body?

Thanks for the explanation, I think the effect is easier to grasp in the second picture because all the lines in the first one make understanding what you actually see quite difficult. But that makes it all the more awesome.

A venerable old EOS 450D. I'm about to upgrade to a used 50D when the guy who owns it gets his 6D (should be before christmas, yay! )

I don't understand why/how we do not see your feet on "Nykarleby plaza"?

It's because I was never in front of the lens in any of the 20-odd pictures of the panorama.

It works like this, you mount the camera on a tripod, shoot a picture, rotate the camera horizontally so that a little bit of the previous picture still is in view in the next, all the way around, making them all overlap slightly. This enables the panorama stitching software match up the edges and produce a large image of them all.

Now, I don't have a lens that covers 180 degrees vertically (even in portrait mode) so I have to take several "levels" of also vertically overlapping rows of photos. The software i smart enough to automatically find similarities between the pictures and align them (and even smart enough to handle several projections of the same subject, so even if you've moved the camera it can align the images, so long as parallax shifts do not occur).

So far so good, now there's only the problem of the tripod at the bottom. To fix this you shoot yet one more picture where you remove the tripod and point the camera straight down (though this is not strictly necessary, the software can still project the nadir image at an angle, but too wide and it will distort it and it becomes ugly)

Hugin, the software that I use, can't really automatically find similiarities for the nadir picture and the rest of the panorama (or I haven't managed it yet) so you end up hunting for simliar features to do it manually and this is a bit of a bother (but not too bad if you were smart when placing your tripod).

Interesting, I shoot film, so that's relatively more complicated this way.

I love hugin, I could look at their gallery all day. http://www.flickriver.com/photos/tags/hugin/interesting/

My brother was over last night and we talked about panorama shooting, so I made this from the old "torget" photos. You don't *have* to put the centerpoint on the ground...

(NB. I didn't have the camera pointed high enough when shooting this one, so there was an empty circle at the zenith. This was later slapdashically painted in with gimp)

No new panorama this time, I didn't have the time to go out.

Wow

That's just pure awesomeness. Like being in a tube looking out on the world that's somehow connected to the tube. Almost disturbing.

Love how the bike fit's in the image too.

Your posted pictures are certainly fine. However, I'd be more interested in the individual shots you used for stitching...

Those are really cool. When you said "stereographic panoramas" I thought you meant the feature on newer sony cameras that lets you shoot a regular panorama but in 3d. (there is a gyro/accelerometer that can tell how far the camera has moved to differentiate left and right). I don't know how well it works as mine is an older model that doesn't do 3d:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/guardian452/8063871669/
most of the time I just use it to get a wider angle that would otherwise be impossible with a point and shoot lens, like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/guardian452/8059943528/

When will there be an iphone "app" that lets you swing your phone about and have it stitch the image into a projection like that, automatically and in real time?

Or... the "easy button" solution!
http://www.rokkorfiles.com/7-5mm.htm

don’t have to ride it, just frame it :)

this thread reminds me of days long past when qtvr was still in beta. yours truly & his wild bunch were having lots of cursing fun testing tripods, heads and the limits of digital photography which was then in its infancy.

keep shootin’ duckling

Why? Want to try out some panorama software? It's just regular, fairly wide angle, shots. Repeated 8 times around and 3 times vertically. I'll put the torget images somewhere if you really want to, but they're quite big.



Ah yes, stereographic projection is a bit misleading, it was invented first though

Android 4.0 and up has this feature in the built-in camera app, I'm sure there's something for iphone too. 4.0 can only take horizontal panoramas while 4.2 introduced "panosphere" which can do adjacent images up to 360x180. You move the phone around and it makes a badly aligned, low resolution panorama, but I guess it's pretty cool. A neat feature is that Google+ automatically shows a VR viewer for those (yes, somebody figured out it was XMP data, and I've replicated it on my panoramas ). That VR viewer sucks for now though, it seems to do something with an html5 canvas and is distorted and ugly for anything but phone shots (where the quality is so bad you can't tell )

Managed to squeeze in some time for shooting today, unfortunately I rushed things and screwed up (BOTH ISO set to auto and camera in Av mode, I must've been asleep or high on pizza). Looks pretty cool anyway. Gritty.

I hope it's alright to upload all these large images btw