Making Distance between Shots for Stitched Panoramas

[Frank Petronio]

http://www.rangefinderforum.com/photopost/data/500/altapan.jpg

I posted this older four-shot stitched panorama in the landscapes thread and then started thinking about it and realized that I don't know of anyone else who has done stitched panos shot from multiple locations.

Most people shoot from one spot but in this case I walked down the road about a 1000' between each frame, to encompass an area about a mile + long.

I'm sure I'm not the only person to have done this but who else is or has? I imagine some of the city-front type panoramas have been done this way - the sort of thing where you see storefront after storefront in a long narrow pan.

What's funny about this image is you can see how the sun came out of the clouds as I walked towards the right side ;-)

So what laws of nature did I break and what would a geographer call this sort of work?

[Jack Dahlgren]

http://www.rangefinderforum.com/photopost/data/500/altapan.jpg

I posted this older four-shot stitched panorama in the landscapes thread and then started thinking about it and realized that I don't know of anyone else who has done stitched panos shot from multiple locations.

Most people shoot from one spot but in this case I walked down the road about a 1000' between each frame, to encompass an area about a mile + long.

I'm sure I'm not the only person to have done this but who else is or has? I imagine some of the city-front type panoramas have been done this way - the sort of thing where you see storefront after storefront in a long narrow pan.

What's funny about this image is you can see how the sun came out of the clouds as I walked towards the right side ;-)

So what laws of nature did I break and what would a geographer call this sort of work?

I used to do this when I was an architect and needed an image of a full city block. I guess I'd call it a planar or linear projection.

[Emmanuel BIGLER]

I imagine some of the city-front type panoramas have been done this way - the sort of thing where you see storefront after storefront in a long narrow pan.

Hello from France !
I have seen such a "panoramic" shot of my hometown, Besançon, a row of old buidlings, made not by rotating the camera but by stitching different images taken at different locations along a path parallel to the buildings.

This is the place, a classical postcard, taken from a conventional point of view and a single shot, not at all related with the "panoramic" shot I am speaking about.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gipe25/2301666926/sizes/z/in/pool-12342758@N00/

The stitched image was perfectly OK, but I suspect that the photographer (a German architecture photographe working with a 6x9 view camera on film when he made the image) chose a cloudy day with very little shadows on the buildings themselves.
He simply walked on the opposite river bank and framed several sections of the buldings as a regular front shot with no vanishing point, the film plane being parallel to the buildings, changing the point of view by walking a certain distance.
Doing so, you'll certainly get parallax effects since the buildings themselves are not perfectly flat, the slightly recessed windows could reveal the trick...

In your approach, you combined a slight rotation of the camera and a change of point of view.
Since your objects are a distant landscape with no foreground, you do not have to deal with parallax effects.
So you can safely ignore the web's favourite questions about the right rotation point for panoramic stiching ;)

Regarding mountain panoramic shots, I'm familiar vith the view over the Swiss Alps that we like to enjoy from the French-Swiss border, looking from the Jura range. The only limitation I would see to change the point of view before stiching cropped images of the distant peaks without foreground, would be if your walking distance could be so great that parallax effects could be visible regarding peaks located in the background, for example the Matterhorn which, in this picture, is located behind the Berner Alps, and is not always visible from various locations in the Jura. But I'm sure that you could walk half a mile if you wish, the nearest mountains being located at about 80 miles in a picture like this. (http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1045/3173755930_098ba3f1ac_z_d.jpg?zz=1)

[Jack Dahlgren]

The stitched image was perfectly OK, but I suspect that the photographer (a German architecture photographe working with a 6x9 view camera on film when he made the image) chose a cloudy day with very little shadows on the buildings themselves.
He simply walked on the opposite river bank and framed several sections of the buldings as a regular front shot with no vanishing point, the film plane being parallel to the buildings, changing the point of view by walking a certain distance.
Doing so, you'll certainly get parallax effects since the buildings themselves are not perfectly flat, the slightly recessed windows could reveal the trick...


I think it is not always necessary to eliminate parallax. Architectural elevations are expected to be free of perspective and if the photographer could minimize it even further by a longer lens then they would.

I think that a camera is capable of seeing things that are not possible with the human eye. And that is one of their powers.

[RoMFOTO]

Beside LF this kind of Panorama Shots is very popular with photographing trees, e.g. the redwood trees (http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/10/vertical_panorama_of_redwood_tree.html).

[Jim Michael]

At the gigapan conference I saw some aerials of the Gulf beaches affected by the oil spill produced by towing a camera (held aloft by a balloon) behind a boat.

[Struan Gray]

Aerial surveys were always done this way, until digital strip scanners took over. The U2 flights sometimes used a whole-mission camera which took overlapping frames of the ground under the plane for the entire trip (which is why I snigger when I see claims to having made the ultimate panoramic image :-).

Ed Ruscha published a concertina book called 'Every Building on the Sunset Strip' in 1966, made from photos taken with a motorised Nikon mounted on a truck. It has iconic status within the art photography canon, but none of the homage/ripoffs I have seen have been very interesting. Used examples of the book are hideously expensive (e.g. (http://www.manhattanrarebooks-art.com/ruscha.htm)) but I would guess GEH have a copy.

[keith schreiber]

While not exactly what Frank is talking about, this piece by Mark Klett required changing the camera position as well as rotation around the vertical axis. If I remember right, there is a space of 50 yards or more between the first and last panels.

http://images.artnet.com/artwork_images/357/239666.jpg

http://www.artnet.com/galleries/Artwork_Detail.asp?G=&gid=357&which=&ViewArtistBy=&aid=9580&wid=3277185&source=artist&rta=http://www.artnet.com

[Greg Miller]

You can buy my book, Panorama of the Hudson River ;) I stitched 300 miles of shoreline of the Hudson River (from the Statue of Liberty to Albany - both shores). I shot over 4,000 photos from moving boats for this project. The companion museum exhibit consisted of two 80 foot long continuous prints. Stitching NYC was a challenge...

[Jack Dahlgren]

These guys stitched together several thousands of miles worth of pano and put it on line.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&q=Googleplex,&sll=37.412301,-122.066603&sspn=0.042472,0.090551&ie=UTF8&rq=1&ev=p&radius=2.98&split=1&filter=0&hq=Googleplex,&hnear=&ll=37.423071,-122.084627&spn=0,0.090551&z=14&layer=c&cbll=37.423108,-122.084832&panoid=x4LkcmnScCZvb4uSTysYOg&cbp=12,218.05,,0,5

[Struan Gray]

I like this too:

http://www.kayroehlen.net/rhein/rhein.html

[Jack Dahlgren]

Here is another about the edge of a body of water

http://www.californiacoastline.org/