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David Medeiros's picture

Photo merged panos from scouting hike.

Here's a pair of photomerged panoramas from a scouting hike today. These are not compositionally great shots, more like practice for the technique of boosting megapixels by taking multiple overlapping shots to create a much larger merged image in Photoshop. The result is much higher resolution image than I'd get in a single shot.

This is only the 2nd time I've tried this technique and I may be hooked! The file size limit on this forum is 15mb so you can't really see how much detail is in the final shots, but it's amazing to look at on my screen. Will need to go back here on a foggy day, or after it starts to rain and the creek fills. Lots of potential for long exposure or misty wood shots.

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4 Comments

nice i have a place by me i want to try this how many degrees of a pan would you say you try and do before you start seeing side effects or image distortion

Not sure. There are a few factors at play. The wider angle the lens of course, the more distortion you'll see. So standing back and zooming in a bit can help. Level the camera on the tripod. And if you have one, a nodal rail to allow the camera to pivot around the lenses nodal point instead of the sensor point.

For the wide forest shot I took 7 shots, overlapping each about 1/3 - 1/2. I was shooting at the FF equivalent of about 40mm. It might have been a sweep of around 60 degrees, not sure. The photomerge tool in PS will produce a more or less distorted shot depending on the variables above, but there is an option to have it run a geometric conversion on the merge as well, which I did. This took out almost all of the distortion in the wide shot.

The vertical shot was 4 overlapping images and maybe a sweep of about 30 degrees. Its full wide (28mm equivalent) and close up so there's a lot more distortion in the trees and the photomerge tool had a harder time processing it.

good to know ill try it this weekend

Panos are great to do David.Ken Duncan of Australia is specialist in what he calls Panographs.