BobL wrote:
There are many panorama stitching programs around that can do this and whole websites on how to make panoramas. It is relatively easy to do for distant landscapes but there are many tricks involved in getting it right inside and especially when people are involved. The individual shots are taken with a 20 to 25% overlap on each side.The biggest problem comes when people on the edges of the individual frames move. If you use portrait framing (which all these panos are) then you only have a relatively narrow middle half/third of the shot that is not part of an adjacent shot. Thus you need to divide your shots up into segments that avoids people at the edges. This was impossible to do in the church pano was and I had to go back and cut and paste a couple of peoples heads from one of the original images into the final pano because they moved so much in between the shots. There is also a parallax problem to avoid but that's probably too technical to discuss in these threads.
All my panos are stitched together using Apple QuickTime VR Authoring tool (I don't think this program is available any more - it ony runs on Mac OS9 and I keep a 3 year old Mac Laptop running on OS9 just to do this) because I also make them into QTVRs. When you use a large MP cameras you can zoom in a long way and check out a lot of detail in QTVRs.
All this is fun but takes planning, processing time and effort. The original image sizes are enormous, for example the over water shot is 50 Mp or 150 Mb of raw image and chews up hard drive space real quick. It takes me about one hour to process the individual images for exposure and then stitch the shots together. Printing takes another hour because I usually do a 50 or 100mm wide test print before I do a final print.
When it works you can get a great effect but it's not something that would probably pay and only do it for friends.
i thought id mention doing pano's works better with a swivel tripod then you can click, move, click, move, click etc without it going off balance so you can stitch it a lot nicer...and then if its not 100% perfect put it in PS and heal the stitched parts you can still see...
Del
