Panoramic Shots. Tips Required.

[The_Spectre]

Interior, relatively small (for a panorama) shot for a restaurant I'm doing work for.

http://www.fabricated.ca/stuff/NRPan02b.jpg

Lighting inconsistencies, lack of colour correction, and glaringly obvious "stitch lines" aside, what techniques are available to minimize the distortion?

I realize that I'm taking a flat shot of a square volume while pivoting in a circle on a tripod, but still, there must be a way to make it appear somewhat seamless as you pan across the space.

My alternative plan is to make it distorted on purpose. Place several overlapping shots on a really long matted background. I think the unevenness of each individual shot might make for an interesting effect.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[Klaus DK]

Taking (good) panoramic shots is not explained in a few lines and will raise questions for you...therefore you might want to read this article:



Feel free to ask any questions about this article.

[Mikefellh]

Here's THE site for panoramic help:

http://www.panoguide.com/

Info on creating, displaying, products for such, and they also have a forum dedicated to panoramic information.

[fonfa]

for what ive seen in your panorama, i think you need to take more shots and cut them in smaller pieces and gather them together.

if you have adobe photoshop, try file > automate > photomerge

[BillDrew]

The_Spectre wrote:

... Lighting inconsistencies, lack of colour correction, and glaringly obvious "stitch lines" aside, what techniques are available to minimize the distortion? ...

Those are two very different issues. Seamless means no visible stitch lines, i.e., the line that divides between two "frames" in the panorama. All kinds of issues come into that, things like uniform and constant lighting, nodal point rotation, fixed exposure & f/stop, choice of software, shooting only when the moon is full, ... And lots of trade-offs between them. All kinds of technical info is available. PanoGuide is a good starting point.

Distortion is a different issue. The root cause of distortion problems with wide angle shots is that the image covers a much larger field of view than the well focused part of our eye covers. There is no solution when printing: you have to pick the kind of distortion that suits the image. For viewing on a computer, the solution is to limit the field of view on the screen to something like 90 degrees or less. Then allow the user to move the image so different areas can be seen - but not all of it at one time. Do some reading on projections.