DSLR Stitching Again

[Henry Ambrose]

I cannot imagine going through all that hell to make a picture of anything. I gave up on Planned Photoshop Heroics years ago. Now I save it (PPH) for life-threatening emergencies only.

How hard do we have to make it? How about 120,000 captures with a cellphone camera assembled in a Cray supercomputer?

A big piece of film and an hour or two in Photoshop ought to get you more than what this guy got in two months. This is getting to be as wrenching as fingernails on a chalkboard.

[gregstidham]

I can hardly wait to see his first 20-stitch portrait.

Don't laugh too hard but this could be a new portrait genre.

[Jim collum]

Don't laugh too hard but this could be a new portrait genre.

Hockney's already done it with film

[gregstidham]

A 45 or 160 image stitch job is not a good example of what it takes to equate "large format" quality.

But in my opinion you need at least 45 frames from a dslr to equate "large format" artistic aesthetic. When is quality not quality or when is art not art? I guess the future art viewers and collectors will decide the definition of quality.

Hockney's already done it with film

Thanks. I guess I was too subtle.

[Jim collum]

But in my opinion you need at least 45 frames from a dslr to equate "large format" artistic aesthetic. When is quality not quality or when is art not art? I guess the future art viewers and collectors will decide the definition of quality.

Thanks. I guess I was too subtle.

subtle? i think i'll give portrait thing a try with the Betterlight

[Marko]

I read it just like Kirk -- Here is what he wrote:

>>I stiched with PTGui but I had lots of mistakes ( especially in the sky) So I made seperate layers ( and this last much longer then creating the complete image ) and put the pacle together in PS. I think my computer worked about 3-4 hours (2,8GHz HT 1GB Ram) Totally this image consists more than 160 shots ( I had to take each image 3-4 times with different exposures and focusing points) From these images I made 45 "perfect" images for stiching Of course in half an hour the sky was chanching a lot which resulted in problems for stiching. For putting the pacle together I needed 2 month<<

Unless a "pacle" is something other than the image, it sure sounds to me like he spent at least a) 1/2 hour capturing b) 160 total frames, then c) selected the best 45, then d) his computer took 3-4 hours to process the 45 images and didn't do a very good job, so e) he then spent 2 months cleaning it all up.

Cheers,

I really didn't mean to turn this into a nitpicking match, I was just making a semi-casual comment on how we all (miss)interpret each others' words...

But given that:

a) English is not his native language by his own admission

and

b) unless I am very mistaken, he sounds either like a native German or some other (central)European language speaker,

he was most likely using the term "pacle" to mean "a pack" in the sense of a small box, something like a pack of cigarettes. In other words a "Package".

Again, I may be wrong with this interpretation, but I just can't see anybody spending full 2 months on just a Photoshop cleanup of a single image - well, ok, a stitch - especially something that looks like a hobby project.

Besides, it may all be totally beside the point - he is clearly simply exploring the limits of the technique, in a very technical sense. I really see no need to berate him for that, regardless of the exact meaning of the terms he used.

[Marko]

How hard do we have to make it? How about 120,000 captures with a cellphone camera assembled in a Cray supercomputer?

A big piece of film and an hour or two in Photoshop ought to get you more than what this guy got in two months. This is getting to be as wrenching as fingernails on a chalkboard.

Well, some people climb mountains, others jump out of planes, yet others dive under the ocean... people in general do the craziest things just for the fun or the challenge of it.

Some even choose to spend hours or days in dark, damp, smelly little rooms sloshing pieces of film or, worse, hand-coated glass exposed using giant cameras through toxic and corosive chemical concoctions that must have been conceived by Dante himself.

Something that could generally be accomplished with a camera that can fit in a shirt pocket and a few minutes in Photoshop.

And then they come here to expound on the purity of the hand-crafted piece of art and the divine process behind it.

[Jack Flesher]

I really didn't mean to turn this into a nitpicking match, I was just making a semi-casual comment on how we all (miss)interpret each others' words...
~~~
he was most likely using the term "pacle" to mean "a pack" in the sense of a small box, something like a pack of cigarettes. In other words a "Package".
~~~
Besides, it may all be totally beside the point - he is clearly simply exploring the limits of the technique, in a very technical sense. I really see no need to berate him for that, regardless of the exact meaning of the terms he used.

Marko:

What you initially wrote read a bit stronger to me than a "semi-casual comment" when I first read it, but I will accept your statement.

If pacle is package, then it still refers to the image as the collection of smaller parts, so no misinterpretation on my part here...

I don't think Kirk's intention was to berate him, but rather to question the wisdom of spending two months to generate the image he showed. I have to agree that it does seem like an inordinate effort for that particular image -- and I happen to be a fan of stitching digital captures!

Cheers,

[Struan Gray]

There's a good panoramic crop lurking in that photo. Cut off the sky and the distant peaks and you get a - to me - great photo with the hikers descending into the red depths of the earth.

Isn't one of the advantages of LF that you can crop severely and still end up with good image quality? (:-P)

The perspective looks the way it does because he has stitched without adjusting the spherical tiling to the more normal academic rectilinear or cylindrical projections. In the right hands this could be an interesting expressive tool. It only looks 'wrong' here because all of us at LF.info have seen a million red hoodoos taken on sheet film with single-point renaissance perspective.

Focus bracketing, exposure bracketing and stitching gets you up to a significant number of frames. I can see how combining them and aligning the stitch by hand while holding down a day job and having a social life could take a couple of months. So what? Does anyone remember the Jeff Wall thread? Am I the only one who knows people with stranger hobbies than that?

ageorge's image makes the point more eloquantly than I can. This is a technique with relevance to LF photographers, especially the 'fine art' ones who work in the f64 tradition. I like to think of it as another tool in the toolbox, and not another nail in any coffin.

[David Luttmann]

But in my opinion you need at least 45 frames from a dslr to equate "large format" artistic aesthetic. When is quality not quality or when is art not art? I guess the future art viewers and collectors will decide the definition of quality.

Thanks. I guess I was too subtle.

Could you better define how an image is more artistic if shot on a sheet of film as opposed to a stitched digital or film image?