High resolution photos from a digital camera.

On 6 Nov 2005 17:56:22 -0800, Scott W wrote:

Both of these photos are stitched from the same 4 photos, I could not
get a wide enough angle view with just one photo and the lens I was
using.

In this first view I have put the view point looking halfway up the
building, like it would be if the shot were taken with normal camera.
http://www.pbase.com/konascott/image/51887904/original

In this next view I have put the view point looking at about the door.
http://www.pbase.com/konascott/image/51887863/original

There are real limits as to how much of this you can do before it
starts to look odd, either with a view camera or stitching software.
In fact the photos from both will look the same, really.

That stitching software appears to be quite useful even if it's
not used to stitch anything together. The first "normal" shot
provides a real "bug's eye" perspective, but I think that most
people would prefer the second. Did you use the program others have
mentioned here (Panotools) or something else? With my eagle eye I
spotted the hawk (or whatever). It was considerate of him to remain
in the same position in both photos. g

ASAAR wrote:
On 6 Nov 2005 17:56:22 -0800, Scott W wrote:

Both of these photos are stitched from the same 4 photos, I could not
get a wide enough angle view with just one photo and the lens I was
using.

In this first view I have put the view point looking halfway up the
building, like it would be if the shot were taken with normal camera.
http://www.pbase.com/konascott/image/51887904/original

In this next view I have put the view point looking at about the door.
http://www.pbase.com/konascott/image/51887863/original

There are real limits as to how much of this you can do before it
starts to look odd, either with a view camera or stitching software.
In fact the photos from both will look the same, really.

That stitching software appears to be quite useful even if it's
not used to stitch anything together. The first "normal" shot
provides a real "bug's eye" perspective, but I think that most
people would prefer the second. Did you use the program others have
mentioned here (Panotools) or something else? With my eagle eye I
spotted the hawk (or whatever). It was considerate of him to remain
in the same position in both photos. g

As I said in my post both photos were stitch from the same 4 photos,
thus the hawk in both. I use PTGui, which use to be a front end for
Pantools but now will run stand alone.

I should point out that if all one wants to do is correct for
perspective in one photo Photoshop can do an ok job.

Scott

Ron Hunter wrote:
Måns Rullgård wrote:
"Scott W" writes:

The photo is of course stitched, it is a way to get a lot of pixels
using a digital camera. This photos does not even come close to what
some others have done, I have seen a 2.5 GP photo. But the high
resolution stitched photos that I have seen to date have been of pretty
static scenes, I wanted something with a bit of a dynamic feel to it,
something where people are doing things in the photo.

If people are moving around too much they might end up in several
places in the picture.

Quite true, which is why most panos are of the landscape variety.


I use to think that you could not have moving people in a stitch scene,
but in trying it quite a few time I have had little problem. This is
why I did this beach scene, the people where moving a fair bit. There
were a few places where I had to adjust where the seam ran between
stitched photos to avoid an artifact, but this is very easy to do with
the tools I have. In many scenes I need to do no adjustment at all.

There are of course limits to this, but it turns out to be much less of
a problem then what one might think.

Scott

Scott W wrote:
Ron Hunter wrote:
Måns Rullgård wrote:
"Scott W" writes:

The photo is of course stitched, it is a way to get a lot of
pixels
using a digital camera. This photos does not even come close to
what some others have done, I have seen a 2.5 GP photo. But the
high resolution stitched photos that I have seen to date have
been
of pretty static scenes, I wanted something with a bit of a
dynamic feel to it, something where people are doing things in
the
photo.

If people are moving around too much they might end up in several
places in the picture.

Quite true, which is why most panos are of the landscape variety.


I use to think that you could not have moving people in a stitch
scene, but in trying it quite a few time I have had little problem.
This is why I did this beach scene, the people where moving a fair
bit. There were a few places where I had to adjust where the seam
ran between stitched photos to avoid an artifact, but this is very
easy to do with the tools I have. In many scenes I need to do no
adjustment at all.

There are of course limits to this, but it turns out to be much less
of a problem then what one might think.

Scott

Just a note of appreciation for your generosity in sharing your
experience in an area you have clearly done a lot of substantial work.

Thank you.

--
Frank ess

On 7 Nov 2005 06:27:51 -0800, Scott W wrote:

As I said in my post both photos were stitch from the same 4 photos,
thus the hawk in both. I use PTGui, which use to be a front end for
Pantools but now will run stand alone.

I knew that. Just kidding. I had forgotten that you mentioned
the 4 photos and looked for the seams. I only spotted two
candidates, one vertical and one horizontal, but was obviously
mistaken, as from the locations it would have indicated that 6
photos were used. I didn't say anything because the signs were so
minimal as to be the sort of things one might see in any
non-stitched photos under high enough magnification.

ASAAR wrote:
On 7 Nov 2005 06:27:51 -0800, Scott W wrote:

As I said in my post both photos were stitch from the same 4 photos,
thus the hawk in both. I use PTGui, which use to be a front end for
Pantools but now will run stand alone.

I knew that. Just kidding. I had forgotten that you mentioned
the 4 photos and looked for the seams. I only spotted two
candidates, one vertical and one horizontal, but was obviously
mistaken, as from the locations it would have indicated that 6
photos were used. I didn't say anything because the signs were so
minimal as to be the sort of things one might see in any
non-stitched photos under high enough magnification.

The 4 photos were taken without the use of a tripod so the stitching is
likely not to be
perfect. The photos were taken close to three years ago with a Nikon
995, so I don't have a huge number of pixels to work with either.

We don't have a lot of neat building to photograph here, mostly
beaches. We do have one old church in town, sometime I am going to
photograph it using my tripod and see what kind of photo I can get.

Scott

Dave Cohen wrote:

good and I have stitched landscape views myself, so I'm both aware of and
certainly not opposed to stitching as a useful technique, I just think the
rational of this post is missing something.

It's missing the obvious bit: what's stopping anyone from scanning
a few 4x5 images and doing exactly the same?

It's got nothing to do with digital cameras and all to do with digital
manipulation of images. Something once can do regardless of
what type of camera is used.

Just another attempt at making digital "better" than 4x5...

Noons wrote:
Dave Cohen wrote:

good and I have stitched landscape views myself, so I'm both aware of and
certainly not opposed to stitching as a useful technique, I just think the
rational of this post is missing something.

It's missing the obvious bit: what's stopping anyone from scanning
a few 4x5 images and doing exactly the same?

It's got nothing to do with digital cameras and all to do with digital
manipulation of images. Something once can do regardless of
what type of camera is used.

Just another attempt at making digital "better" than 4x5...

You could stitch 4 x 5 photos, but is this really needed. For 35mm
film you are talking about shooting a whole roll of film to get one
photo. Clearly it is much easier to do the stitching when using a
digital camera.

But the point I was making was not that this was something you could do
with a digital camera and not a film camera but rather the limits of
print size from a digital camera is not determined by the size of one
frame.

For me I like to be able to get very high resolution photos but I
don't want to be bothered with dealing with processing and scanning
film, this is a way for me to get very high resolution photos. For
other dealing with a computer to do the stitching is not attractive and
so for them a LF camera would make more scene.

The point, in part, is that if you are going to show how far you can go
with film by using a 4 x 5 camera why not show how far you can go by
stitching digital photos.

I think high resolution photos are great, I think more people should
take them. There are a lot of people who will not mess with a LF
camera to get high resolution photos but might be willing to stitch
photos to get there. I have been impressed with the improvements over
the years at the stitching software, I thought it would be useful to
show what can be done in this area.

Scott

On Mon, 7 Nov 2005 12:02:22 +0900, "David J. Littleboy"
wrote:

"Rich" wrote:
"Joseph wrote:
Dave Cohen wrote:
...

I must be losing it in my old age. So I'm standing alongside this guy
who is carefully composing an image of this beautiful old church and
is using the swing and tilt feature of his 4x5 to include the
steeple. Now using the technique described in this post, what exactly
do I do, get close to the subject and take a shot of a few bricks (or
stones at a time), climb up a ladder to shoot the steeple, then
stitch the whole thing together. Since I'm using dial-up, I can't view
the
sample. I'm confident it's
very good and I have stitched landscape views myself, so I'm both
aware of and certainly not opposed to stitching as a useful
technique, I just think the rational of this post is missing
something. Dave Cohen

I believe that Scott cover that in his original message: " I am
trying
to say is that some of the limitations that many people believe digital
cameras have are not real limitations at all."

Only the solution in that case eliminated one limitation while it
produced another limitation, namely the inability to control things in
a non-static environment while taking
multiple shots. But the technique does work well with distant
landscapes or still-lifes.

But landscapes and still lifes are the main use of large format, so digital
stitching is actually quite a practical alternative.

My current fantasy is to figure out how to do 3-frame panoramas warped to
rectilinear projection with the added twist that the left and right frames
are taken with a longer focal length to minimize image quality loss
associated with the warping.

I just acquired Lee Frost's "Panoramic Photography", which has a lot of
GX617 and Xpan shots, and I think I prefer rectilinear to cylindrical
projection for a lot of things...

David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan


Well, there is this:
http://www.altostorm.com/
I don't know how well it works to retain left-right side image
quality.
-Rich

On Sun, 06 Nov 2005 08:41:11 -0700, "Richard H." wrote:

Scott W wrote:
The photo is of course stitched, it is a way to get a lot of pixels
using a digital camera. This photos does not even come close to what
some others have done, I have seen a 2.5 GP photo. But the high
resolution stitched photos that I have seen to date have been of pretty
static scenes, I wanted something with a bit of a dynamic feel to it,
something where people are doing things in the photo.

Interesting test - what did you use for the stitching? How much overlap
was there between the shots? Did you use a rigging to take the
photos, or was it handheld?

Buried on my list of to-dos, I'd like to experiment with very
large-scale stitching, with a goal in the 1000MP range (wall-sized
high-res print).

I expected to do a static scene, and probably make a rig to pan & scan
the ~400 images. This could even fit on one memory card, but flash
recording time will be the limiting factor for a live scene - capturing
a single scene could easily take 2 minutes. Using a bank of several
cameras might be an (expensive) idea, if the colors / exposures can be
balanced.

Your example is encouraging; maybe a live scene is even viable if the
images can be captured quickly enough. Perhaps by rapid-firing the live
areas and methodically collecting the static portions, then compiling
the result - what was your technique?.

Cheers,
Richard

You also should factor in the substantial computer you need to deal
with these things, if you don't want them to take forever to do.
I did a 12 picture (8 meg camera) pano (I took the shots at a longer
f.l. to minimize any distortion) and it took HOURS to assemble with a
slightly slower older computer with only 384m of memory.
-Rich