Swiss Panoramic Images + Urban Lines
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- 30, hey a balmy Canadian winters day
. Beautiful work Oli 
- 30, hey a balmy Canadian winters day
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That second view is from the platform on the Klein Mattahorn... You can see Italy and Cervinia ski area....beautiful...Zermatt is one of my most favourite ski destinations.
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Remember this incredible free prog : autostitch
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@unknownuser said:
That second view is from the platform on the Klein Mattahorn... You can see Italy and Cervinia ski area....beautiful...Zermatt is one of my most favourite ski destinations.
yes, I was expecting a comment from you.
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Thanks Pilou, I have been using photomerge in photoshop and they require a lot of work to appear seamless. The swiss images took about 2 hours of post processing each to remove distortions while altering levels across the image. If the panoramic is made up of say 15 photographs, each one has a slightly different range of levels so I'm trying to homogenize the whole photograph as effectively as possible, this normally requires lots of level/curve adjustments and masking. Once I use a good fish eye lens on a dslr I should be achieving a much more uniform result, plus you can get automated rotating tripods.
Good to see you again Sid. What would you say is your absolute favourite destination? The whole time I was there it just felt like a surreal dream, it's like a postcard image everywhere you look! Plus the matterhorn is a fantastic navigation beacon. My brother and I are very experienced skiiers but we took along a friend who has only ever skied indoors at the snow dome!! When we stood at the top of that slope, the famous bump bash, he was almost in tears!! There were 4 foot moguls the whole way down, he ended up sliding down most of it on his chest!!
ALL on camera!! "Guys, I don't think I can do this!" 
What an incredible slope though!There were other skiers going back on the gondola it was so extreme, never seen so many people cack it!
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Verbier, Zermatt and Hintertux Glacier....not sure which one I like more.
Michalis you know me too well
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Very nice panoramas Oli.
But not in a equirectangular format. -
@michaliszissiou said:
Very nice panoramas Oli.
But not in a equirectangular format.I know, these are for the curved backgrounds. So, no distortion.
Michalis which is the best, most dynamic process for making equirectangular images? It seems there are several techniques. Do you really need a fisheye lens?
I've seen this:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/equirectangular/discuss/72057594138421542/It seems the photographer uses wide angle lens with camera orientated portrait (to fit more height in).
@unknownuser said:
My lens is an ultra-wide angle (equivalent 16mm in 24x36 photography terms). The field of view if 97° along the length and 74° along the width. 4 shots would be enough for a 360° pano if the camera was oriented in landscape mode.
hardware requirements here:
http://www.binarycrumbs.com/2008/12/introduction-to-equirectangular.html
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Oli,
you asked for some homework?
Here it comes. A very powerful app, an open source app. A cross platform app, actually.
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
No, you don't need a fisheye lenses. But it might help a lot.The bigger problem is to produce hdri images. You need more than one take... for each shot. But, it's the only way for quality lighting.
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@michaliszissiou said:
Oli,
you asked for some homework?
Here it comes. A very powerful app, an open source app. A cross platform app, actually.
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
No, you don't need a fisheye lenses. But it might help a lot.The bigger problem is to produce hdri images. You need more than one take... for each shot. But, it's the only way for quality lighting.
Thanks I did actually try converting my existing panoramas using hugin but felt like I was hitting a brick wall. I am hoping to take 3 shots per image at different exposures, just need to figure out which is the best camera setup for me. Need a proper tripod too that mounts to the lens. Obviously the wider my lens the more I can fit in so less to process in the end.
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@unknownuser said:
Thanks I did actually try converting my existing panoramas using hugin but felt like I was hitting a brick wall
Same here... but in the end I had something... making me to search the whole matter further.
Anyway, matterhorn looks like hell to me. Always impressive. Unbelievable.
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haha yeah I got to the spherical wrapping part but it just didn't work.
I don't know if I can actually take 3 images per 8 pano shots, will be 24 shots in total whereas it looks like most photographers just use 8 raw images.
this appears to be most dynamic technique:
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Very nice. That is some clean stitching of the pano, most apps leave broken or blurry edges.
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@escapeartist said:
Very nice. That is some clean stitching of the pano, most apps leave broken or blurry edges.
Thanks, lots and lots of clone stamping!!
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An easy and accurate way to find a nodal point:
1 Put your camera on a tripod
2 Take two light stands and line them up in the middle of your frame with one behind the other.
3 Rotate your camera left and right until the light stands touch the edge of the frame.
4 If the light stands remain aligned, one behind the other, you have found the nodal point.
5 If one light stands pops out from behind the other you must move the camera back and forth relative to the rotation axis of the tripod until the light stands remain aligned.
6 To move the camera relative to the rotational axis of the tripod you need a pano head that lets you slide the camera back and forth while you search for the nodal point. You need to mark this sliding stage to show the nodal point of each of your prime lenses. (a prime lenses is a lens with only one focal length i.e. a non zoom lens.)
7 With telephoto lenses imaging subjects at a distance the correct nodal point will have little significance to your final image. With wide angle lenses imaging prominent foregrounds, you have to place the nodal point accurately or the images will not stitch.Hope this helps and am glad to answer any questions.
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Hi Roger and thank you for your help. This is the technical information I need, I still have lots to learn.
I am looking to buy the nodal ninja tripod below: Which of the two would be most practical for my needs?
I am looking at either NN4:
http://www.nodalninja.com/products/nn4/20/
Or the Ultimate M1:
http://www.nodalninja.com/products/ultimate-m1/23/
Also this camera:
http://www.jessops.com/online.store/products/80903/show.html
And this lens:
http://www.jessops.com/online.store/products/27901/show.html
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A fish eye lenses.
Meanwhile, an equirectangular panorama is a 1x2 image. Your wonderful panoramas miss the upper and down information.
I still don't understand the geometry of this 'equirectangular' thing.
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@michaliszissiou said:
Meanwhile, an equirectangular panorama is a 1x2 image. Your wonderful panoramas miss the upper and down information.
I still don't understand the geometry of this 'equirectangular' thing.Yeah exactly, by orientating the camera portrait you achieve this up and down information....also you take a photo directly upwards and one directly downwards to complete the equirectangular image.
So you take 6 photos around, one up and one down. 8 wide-angle photos in total.
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Read this page below Michalis:
http://www.rosaurophotography.com/html/technical3.html
Imagine the applications though, say you are designing a building for a new site.....No need to model the site for prelims, you can just take a spherical image for visualization rendering.
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@olishea said:
Hi Roger and thank you for your help. This is the technical information I need, I still have lots to learn.
I am looking to buy the nodal ninja tripod below: Which of the two would be most practical for my needs?
I am looking at either NN4:
Or the Ultimate M1:
http://www.nodalninja.com/products/ultimate-m1/23/
Also this camera:
http://www.jessops.com/online.store/products/80903/show.html
And this lens:
http://www.jessops.com/online.store/products/27901/show.html
Oliver, a great question. A simple question but hard to answer because it branches out in many directions. But I will try.
We need to analyze your goals. Do you want to use a DLSR to make prints with more resolution than an 11x14 camera? Or do you want to take fish eye photos that serve as virtual environments for renderings? Are you going to be shooting in bright sun or at night under available starlight? Do you want to travel light or are prepared to lug around whatever it takes? Will you be placing a single story building in a broad landscape shot from a distance or will you be shooting the Sears Tower from across the street? For most uses you don't need any sophisticated equipment and for extreme cases you do. If lenses were perfect and if film/sensors had infinite resolution all cameras would come with just one fisheye lens an you just crop into the image to get the composition you want. Wide angle distortion DOES NOT exist. Wide angle perspective does exist and we call it distortion. The eye only takes sharp pictures across perhaps 10 degrees of vision. If I stare at this screen without moving my head or eyeballs, I can only see the words "perhaps 10" sharply. However that is not my normal visual perception because my eyes constantly scan the area in front of me and "stitch together" a perception. And that is not all that happens. We live with a lot of rectilinear shapes so we know about straight lines and right angles. Because we "know about these things" the mind takes the curves we actually see and straightens the edges. So if you want to make a print 9ft long and 1ft high for your bed room wall with a very wide perspective, you cant get by with the fisheye as the picture would look soft and blurry at that magnification. To get around that limitation you can stitch together 10 or 12 photos with a normal lens and have a file of 100 to 200 megapixels that will be sharp as a tack at 9ft x 1ft. Now if you want to use a fisheye you can have a 5 megapixel or lower file if you want to use the scene as a light source and a rendering background. You can get away with this because any low res blur will be perceived as depth of field effect. So you only need stitched photos to increase the resolution limit of your camera or to get a wider angle shot than your lens would normally allow. If you are creating a 9ft x 1ft photo, nodal point probably won't be an issue because you won't have much foreground or foresky because the format is too narrow for either one to show. So one row panos rarely have a problem with photo alignment when you do the stitching. But lets say you want to stitch super high res photo that will print sharply at 9x12 feet. Now, instead of one row of photos, you will need a lot more photos arrayed in multiple rows. Because of the more rectangular photo you will have much more foreground and sky and the tile floor just in front of you will be much closer than buildings on the horizon. In this case if the nodal point is off the tile floor will simply not stitch together. It is here that you must have something to stabilize your nodal point. The more stuff on the groundplane in the foreground the more you need to control the nodal point. Cell phones are forgiving because they are only a couple mm thick and it is hard to get too far from the nodal point. With a big telephoto, the nodal point can get way off from where you are rotating the camera, maybe more than a foot. This can become unstitchable. For a one row pano of fairly flat land I can go fairly freehand with most lenses. If I want super resolution wide angle image consisting of many telephoto shots I can use the method described in the previous post to determine my lenses nodal point. I have to keep the nodal point fixed relative to a fixed point on the ground. How can I do that? One way is to buy an expensive nodal ninja at $300 to $400. Another way is throw a coin on the ground to mark my fixed point that I will rotate the camera about. Then I can put a loop of string around my long lens at the position of the nodal point and hang a plumb bob (a 20 cent washer) on a string that almost reaches the coin on the ground. Now with no tripod and under 20 cents of equipment I can do a really detailed one row pano and spend the $400 on a really nice lunch. Let me diverge for a moment to introduce another complication - time. The worst Pano I ever saw was was taken on a really windy day and the same cloud kept reappearing again and again and again ad infinitum all across the pano. The problem was not nodal point but the cloud was moving across the scene at the same rate the photographer was panning and reframing the shots that would make up the pano. So here, the ultimate tool is anything that thing reduces the speed at which you can take your shots and keep the nodal point consistent. Gigapan systems make robotic tripod heads. With this you point the camera to the bottom left of your final scene and punch a button to record the position then you do this again to mark the position for the upper right exposure. Next you figure out the time for your camera to record the scene and write the info to the data card. You key the resulting interval between exposures into the camera. You also key in the desired overlap between frames (30% is a good rule of thumb. When you finally press the go button the robot takes you input and precalculates the precise position of every shot before machine gunning through the entire picture array as fast as you input data will let it go. This tool will set you back $800 to $1200 dollars. Photos of Obama's inauguration showed 10,000 people on the capitol mall and you can still zoom in with enough resolution to see Joe Biden's cuff links. Now for general daylight lighting simulation lighting and rendering backgrounds, I would go with the string and the washer. If you are going to make giant display prints in hostile environments for high res interactive virtual environments or games, you might want the gigapan. For me, if I was doing really high end display prints of architectural interiors for picky clients paying big bucks for the result, one of the nodal Ninja devices might be just the ticket. I will look at the two units a little more and get back to you.
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