My Latest Crazy Project

Hey gang, earlier this year I had set out to photograph some of the art that has been popping up in downtown Vancouver, WA as murals.

Well, in a nutshell I was challenged by one of these things, a wide one with at least one, sometimes more than one, blocking my attempts, so I tried to photograph it in three segments and then have Photoshop stitch them into a panorama.

Well, the results were less than stellar, and my Photoshop skill are, shall we say, lacking in recent years. So, I'll post this link to my PBase page where you can read the overall description, then open the first image and just "Next" them in order and read the image "Captions" for the gruesome details. To see the pics larger, go to the sizes options below the first shot and click on "original".

And then you can come back here and laugh at me -- I left it and "wiped my hands" of it with plenty of room for improvement for someone who, unlike me, "knows their stuff"!

Here it is:

http://www.pbase.com …g/my_latest_cra​zy_project

Tony,
Your challenge is not unique. Photographing something like that mural requires some planning.
A couple of approaches, pano stitching or blending multiple "parallel" images.

If I were going to do a pano, I'd use a fairly long lens to minimize the arch relative to the mural.

I'd also shoot it with the camera in portrait mode and make images that overlap about 40%. Photoshop has an import for pano feature that should help.

The other approach is to measure and draw a line that is a specific distance from the mural, then move the camera and tripod along this line, again with the images overlapping close to 40%. Then use the pano stitching software. Naturally, for either approach you will have to make sure the came back is perpendicular to the ground (parallel to the wall on which the mural is painted.)

Its doable, just time consuming. It looks like there is some glare on some of the images. That means it will be important to choose a time of day when the light is favorable and not causing glare. A bright overcast day might be best.

Shifting the camera horizontally is a tricky prospect for such a stitch. You are likely better off establishing a central reference point and fixing the camera position (tripod) and then rotating the camera around its no parallax point to shoot a sequence of images. Then stitch. This is standard pano workflow. It appears that the angle of view for this mural is not too large, so the stitch may only require a few images to contain the entire mural with a workable number of pixels ("workable number" depends on final output requirements).

The shift and shoot technique may work here because the object you are shooting is planar. Careful attention must be observed to maintain a perpendicular orientation between the lens axis and the plane of the mural - something that may not be so easy.

Glare may be managed with a polarizing filter, but this may add a gradient of exposure across the image - as mentioned above, it may be better to wait until the light is indirect and not creating glare on the image.

One of the best ways to practice is to shoot a panoramic image of a similarly situated brick wall or gridded structure. Any errors in the technique or resulting stitch will be very obvious and help debug the process.

kirk

Hey, guys, thanks for the feedback!

It's true that this was totally unplanned, I not ony didn't have a tripod, but the vehicles forced me into some very problematic anges!

I figure that the next time I try this will be a morning when there won't be vehicles and I can get properly set up! 'Course it will have be after winter...

Well, it was a fun "Project", now I just need to get the other work out there and save this mural for another day!

Check this out. Should fit what you need exactly. The Adaptive Wide Angle command in cs6

http://library.creativ​ecow.net …Correction/vide​o-tutorial

Tony,here is a pano stitchI did of a mural here in St Pete. It was 3 or 4 images. I used my 18-55mm at 18mm, I shot it right at the curb, which is about 6-8' away from the building. I couldn't get further away because there were trees that would have blocked the mural. I did have to adjust for the wa distortion, but I think it came out pretty good. I started at the left side, eyeballed a 1/3 overlap, and stayed perpendicular to the mural (the curb helped in that regard). Then I just stitched it in CS5, and you see the end result.

Hey, thanks guys! Kirk, you did a good job with that mural! I wasn't able to get 6' back, but maybe next time!

JackFlash, I started on the video but he is presumably using CS6. The Adaptive Wide Angle tool is new to CS6, it isn't in my CS5, but Oh Well!