Beautiful Melbourne Day....d/u warning

[ajax]

It was a very nice n sunny today. Took some shots on Yarra. Pano using autostitch.

Please critique.



cheers
ajax

[Killakoala]

Not bad, not bad at all. Great spot for a pano too. There is a bit of light falloff in the sky on the left but not enough to be significant.

Great work.

[johnd]

Nice pano and nice composition Ajax. I can see some diagonal colour mismatches in the sky on my monitor. I've noticed the same types of colour gradients in the sky when I first tried stitching in Photoshop CS, so I trialed Panorama Factory (quite a few people on this forum use it) and got results without any visible colour gradients. So I ended up buying Panorma Factory. You can download Panorama Factory and trial it for free, it just leaves some text smack in the middle of your image (you need to pay some $$s to not get the text).

[ajax]

Thanks for the feedback.
In the pano there are 8 shots. I was trying the new cpl I bought (b+w mrc thin cpl santa came early )
Could the light falloff / diagonal mismatches be because of the cpl ? Certainly the sun's position changed as I moved from right to left for the pano. Please let me know how the shots could be improved.

cheers,
ajax

[johnd]

Could the light falloff / diagonal mismatches be because of the cpl ? Certainly the sun's position changed as I moved from right to left for the pano. Please let me know how the shots could be improved.

cheers,
ajax

I don't think so, not unless you rotated it between shots. In fact you shouldn't change anything between shots. I set my focus, aperture, exposure time on 1 frame (typically middle one), then change to completely manual. Then take the shots as quick as possible in succession (so light changes are minimal), rotating camera on tripod and making sure you get about 25% overlap. Do it in raw so the camera won't go making any jpg optimisation decisions for you. Then import all raws together and synch them all so they have same WB, etc etc. Then into the pano tool. And don't let the pano tool do any exposure adjustments for you.

This technique works for me. Hope it helps.

Cheers, John

[ajax]

John,

That makes sense. I violated 2 rules here:
shots were hanheld (didn't have tripod in lunchbreak)
camera was on A mode.

I'll try it as per your suggestions. Just one thing. Even set the focus on middle frame ? Will it take some oof in other frames ?

cheers
ajax

[ajax]

edit: A as not Auto but Aperture Priority mode.

[owen]

Hi Ajax.

I'm going to be honest and I hope you don't mind. I believe that panorama photos should follow the same composition rules as normal photos, if not moreso. The image that you posted if it were a normal one has nothing in the foreground, an okay middleground but nothing to hold my interest, and some nice clouds.

I feel that if you could have shot this and perhaps had something in the foreground maybe on the left of centre side, then the whole image would have that extra something.

I hope this helps you. Please don't take offense.

I do however commend you on your job stitching together 8 images taken hand held. That's impressive.

Regards,
Owen.

[ajax]

owen,
no offence at all.
I asked for the critique, you were frank. I like that. That's how I learn, from the seniors here. You will laugh if I tell you, actually there was a tourist ferry right in the spot you suggested and I waited till it disappeared around the bend

[mudder]

G'day mate,

Nice work Yep some foreground interest would have given the image a big lift, the ferry going around the bend would have been spot on. The differences in the sky where the shots have been stitched is probably due to using the CPL. The effect from the CPL will vary as the angle from the sun varies between shots as the cam swings around (not the sun moving, the angle from the cam to the sun, the CPL's effect is strongest at 90deg to the sun which changes as you swing the cam around), so if you don't use the CPL you'll probably find the images will blend together a lot easier and have less differences particularly in the sky... You can always obtain a similar effect to the CPL in PS.

I thought Autostitch was terrific but it only outputs jpeg, also, it looks like Autostitch now has a commercial version available here:
http://www.autopano.net/

I'm a sucker for a nice pano, they're great eh?

Cheers mate.

[johnd]

Ajax, aperture priority may/will cause exposure time to vary between shots. That's why I go for manual. One of the up sides of not changing focus between shots is easier stitching. One of the downsides is that some parts of the final pano may be out of focus. It's a judgement call that you need to make about what's most important.

One techinque that I haven't played with is having the pano software place each image in a separate layer so you can play around with the blending in Photoshop. Pano Factory 4 does this evidently, but I haven't got round to upgrading from 3.4 (which didn't). So with this technique you may be able to optimise each shot more and still have a pano without any obvious stitch marks. I'm going to upgrade to version 4 and play round with some panos again soon.

That's one of the exciting things about dslr photography, so many things to experiment with and get near instant feedback.

Cheers
John

[johnd]

The effect from the CPL will vary as the angle from the sun varies between shots as the cam swings around (not the sun moving, the angle from the cam to the sun, the CPL's effect is strongest at 90deg to the sun which changes as you swing the cam around), so if you don't use the CPL you'll probably find the images will blend together a lot easier and have less differences particularly in the sky... You can always obtain a similar effect to the CPL in PS.

Good point Andrew.