Suggestions for how to approach a circular sunset panorama?

I'm working on sorting out a process that I've only ever done with film, and the last time I did it was over two decades ago. A lot has changed since then!

I would actually call what I'm working on a 360° panorama, but I'm just using a 21mm lens (in portrait orientation) so I think the modern terminology is a "circular" panorama.

It is going to be a bit of a production to get all of my gear to the location, so I really don't want to have to reshoot this. I'll be carrying in my heavy tripod with a geared head. I've been experimenting in my backyard, but the line of sight is very limited by fences, garages, houses, and whatnot. I lose the sun behind our neighbour's house too early in the evening.

My plan is to start with a photograph of the sun (that is exposed for the foreground), and then work clockwise 360° taking photographs with the same exposure settings as the first image, with the final photograph being of the sun once again.

When I did this with film, I just pieced my panoramas together on a light table using an X-Acto knife and masking tape. The fact that the transition between the images was hard, and that each image was darker than the next, was okay in 1988.

With modern technology, I'm hoping to be able to blend the images so that the darkening of the landscape is subtle throughout the panorama.

I want the first photograph to be taken around half an hour before sunset. The sun will be over a ridge, my camera will be set up in a creek valley below it, and I'm not sure how quickly I'm going to lose sun completely.

So, in covering 360° in 30 minutes (plus potentially one extra shot), that is 12° a minute. That would be 30 shots, but I don't think that will give me enough overlap? So, perhaps 60 shots: one every 6°, taken every 30 seconds would work? Or, to make it easier, maybe 72 shots, one every 5°, taken every 25 seconds would be better? The five degree markings are pretty obvious on my tripod head. I'd love some feedback on this!

Also, as far as putting the panorama together in Photoshop, what would produce the best blended transition between frames? I'm thinking what makes sense is to load the photographs using the image stacking script to align the images and create a smart object out of them, and then blend them using the "mean" or "median" modes. Is there a better way to do it, or a better blend mode to use?

Thank you, in advance, for your advice.

My calcs were way off. 59° vertical field of view with the lens. Round that to 60°. 6 photos will give me almost complete coverage. 12 photos will give me ~50% overlap. But, I want more overlap than that to try to graduate the darkening of the scene, so I'm thinking 24 photographs, in 15° increments, taken 1 minute apart should be about right?

Does this help?

http://www.vrwave.com …amic-lens-database/canon/

Alveric wrote in post #17982112
Does this help?

http://[URL]www.vrwave​.com …amic-lens-database/canon/

Awww. Thank you. I should have specified that I'm using a Zeiss lens. I'm sorry.

These are the specs for the lens I'll be using:
http://www.zeiss.ca …ets_slr/distago​nt2821.pdf

If you're using a 21mm Zeiss on a full frame body, then the data therein for the Canon EF 20mm f/2.8 should be right down your alley.

Depending on your tripod head, shooting a pano such as this one should take no more than a few minutes. I wouldn't anticipate 30 minutes or more unless you're doing long time exposures. Are you shooting brackets for HDRI?

I want to see a significant decrease in light from one end of the scene to another. I was thinking 30 minutes would accomplish this really well. But, at the same time, it might be just way too much time. I don't want the scene to be completely dark by the time I get back around to the start.

How long the exposures themselves will be will depend on a number of factors, with the biggest being windspeed. I'm hoping to shoot at f11 with ISO at 200, but if it is windy I'll need a faster shutter speed. I'll just have to adapt once I'm out there. In looking at the long term weather forecast, I'll be out there Wednesday evening at the earliest, but Friday evening is more likely.

I was thinking brackets might be a good idea, but I'm not sure if that would complicate things too much at this point. I suppose I could shoot the brackets and just not use them if I felt the post was too complicated.

I'll have a good look at the Canon data.

Hmm, interesting. Can't say I've tried that myself; the few 360° panos I've done have been in the afternoon. I've used Sunny 16 –no HDR.

Pine Island
Central Park

I'm thinking that if you wait too much between shots, the hues and values might come out too different and without any smooth transition, adding considerably to your post production time. Kinda like stitching and then blending a patch of ochre and a patch of canary yellow.

If you haven't by now, I'd watch some of these: https://www.youtube.co​m …t?list=PL15B8C7​37F69319BE, there might be some info there that might help you.

(Now I wanna try a sunset 360° pano myself )

Alveric wrote in post #17982112
Does this help?

http://www.vrwave.com …amic-lens-database/canon/

This does help!

Alveric wrote in post #17982170
Hmm, interesting. Can't say I've tried that myself; the few 360° panos I've done have been in the afternoon. I've used Sunny 16 –no HDR.

Pine Island
Central Park

I'm thinking that if you wait too much between shots, the hues and values might come out too different and without any smooth transition, adding considerably to your post production time. Kinda like stitching and then blending a patch of ochre and a patch of canary yellow.

If you haven't by now, I'd watch some of these: https://www.youtube.co​m …t?list=PL15B8C7​37F69319BE, there might be some info there that might help you.

(Now I wanna try a sunset 360° pano myself )

Those are great panoramas that you've done. You should try a sunset/sunrise one!

I don't think the project as I envision it is going to work out from a post processing perspective, so I'm going to do three sets of images: one standard set, one bracketed set, and then my set to capture the changing light as the sun goes down.

Now I have to wait for the sun to come back, which will hopefully be sometime this week.

Of course, maybe you were thinking of something more like this: www.stephenwilkes.com/​fine-art/day-to-night

Alveric wrote in post #17983294
Of course, maybe you were thinking of something more like this: www.stephenwilkes.com/​fine-art/day-to-night

That is an awesome series! Thank you for sharing it. Some of those are very similar to what I'm envisioning. The biggest difference would be that my aspect ratio will be very different, and my most processing won't be a 1/4 as good.

Can't help with how to do it Shelley, but I want to see it once you get it done.

rrblint wrote in post #17983354
Can't help with how to do it Shelley, but I want to see it once you get it done.

I'll post it.

I'm not sure what condition the site is in right now. It is riparian area in a small valley here inside the Calgary city limits. The city is really good about protecting the area, and in the event a portion of the area has become damaged (either through a natural event or human behaviour) they put up fencing to block access off to the damaged section and allow it to recover naturally. The fencing is often up for a few years. I don't know if anything new has gone up this year, but there have been some pretty large fenced off areas for the last few years. I might not be able to avoid having some fencing in the photos.

I was going to take the dog for a walk there today to try to scope out the exact location to set up, but she's old and doesn't like the rain. The same can be said for me.

There are a bunch of other places I want to try this (particularly along the "Blue Ribbon" section of the Bow River where I fly fish), but I figured I would start with a location that was close to home to try to iron out most of the kinks.

I spent yesterday testing software for stitching together panoramas. Photoshop did a very good job, but I was hoping to find software that would do a great job of stitching together photographs without balancing out exposure issues between the frames.

I found one! "Autopano Pro" by Kolor (which appears to be under the "GoPro" umbrella). I found it really intuitive to use, and I was able to turn off exposure corrections. The end result was very useable, with only a few Photoshop corrections required.

I use PTGUI for panos; then it's off to Pano2VR for the virtual tour.

Alveric wrote in post #17984444
I use PTGUI for panos; then it's off to Pano2VR for the virtual tour.

I tried PTgui. It had a hard time with my underexposed TIFFs. Hugin also had real troubles with my underexposed TIFFs. I tried them on my Mac. I don't know if the programs would have been more successful on a Windows machine.

Photoshop did well with the underexposed TIFFs, but it couldn't deal with the three worst ones.

Autopano Pro aligned all of them. It must be making exposure adjustments of some sort before aligning the files, even though I had exposure corrections turned off and they weren't rendered in the final TIFF. I was really impressed.

In all fairness to the developers of PTgui and Hugin, I threw a significant wrench into the works. I'm working on a pretty non-standard application, and some of those photos were really underexposed.