High resolution photos from a digital camera.

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

Scott W 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

You would set up your camera at the same spot the guy shooting the 4 x
5 view camera would. With the 4 x 5 camera he can get the whole photo
in one shoot, with the digital it would take a number of shoot, the
camera stays in the same spot but is aimed at different parts of the
church. The software can stitch the photo as if a view camera was
being used, at least the shift part which is what corrects for the
perspective.

This is fine for somewhat flat objects. If you are using a spherical head, and
there are near and far objects in the scene, then the view camera with movements
will give a very different look to the relationship of those near and far
objects; the spherical head will place some near and far objects at orientations
not as they are in the original scene. It could be argued that unless someone
knew the place that had been photographed, then the placement of near and far
objects might not look unnatural. However, there is still the issue of movements
between frames.


Most people do not understand how a shifting lens works, basically the
camera lens that is used with a view camera has a much larger field of
view then the film, if you want to shoot something like a church you
point the camera straight at the horizon and then shift the lens up or
the film down. You could get the same effect by using a 8 x 10 sheet
of film in the 4 x 5 camera, not shifting the lens and cropping the
photo.

One easy panorama technique with a 35 mm shift lens on an SLR or D-SLR, is to
photograph one frame at full left shift, then photograph another frame at full
right shift. Later both frames are combined at the overlap to produce the
panorama.

Another approach is to use a rail, or sliding plate. You take the first image
with the camera slid all the way left, then the second with the camera all the
way right. The film plane can then be parallel to the image plane, unlike when
using a spherical head, or when just rotating the camera on a tripod head.



I think using a view camera is a great way to get a fantastic photo and
am not arguing against it. What I am trying to say is that there is a
lot more that you can do with a digital camera then many people are
aware of.

Sure, but someone could use a similar head and stitch together large format
images. There is no reason stitching has to start as only direct digital images.
Anything that could be done in the computer with direct digital images could be
done with scanned film too.

A side issue that most of these comparisons fail to note is the aperture often
used on the view camera. Quite often testers have noted using f22 on the view
camera. Testing by Chris Perez and others has shown that view camera lenses are
often close to their diffraction limit at f22, meaning there is an absolute limit
to the possible resolution. In other words, using a view camera at a limited
resolution is compared to a direct digital camera that might have a better
combination of settings, or at the very least the D-SLR has an easier time
getting near that about 60 lp/mm of that view camera at f22.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat
A G Studio
http://www.allgstudio.com

Scott W wrote:

Ray Fischer wrote:
One can stitch together images from a 4x5 camera as well.

Well yes you could but a 4 x 5 camera has pretty great resolution with
just one photo. Kind of hard to imaging someone wanting to take a lot
of 4 x 5 photos just to stitch them together.

I know a professional architecture photographer who just did a job like
that. Of course, it was only four frames, and the camera was only in one
position. Shift and rise/fall were used to get four images. Then the four
frames were drum scanned, and the overlap matched up to produce one final
image. In this situation, the issue was that the widest lens he had, and
that he could only take the shot of the building from across the street
at ground level, the stitched 4x5 shots was the only solution.

Granted, that is probably not done that often. Given a view camera with
enough movements, it could be a quite easy thing to do. The other nice
thing is lining up everything on the ground glass.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat
A G Studio
http://www.allgstudio.com

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