panoramic photo

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Richard

I seen on TV about taking a panoramic photo with Vista. I want to take 3
pictures of my back yard and make one panoramic photo. How do I do this?
 
Richard said:
I seen on TV about taking a panoramic photo with Vista. I want to take 3
pictures of my back yard and make one panoramic photo. How do I do this?
Click to expand...


Excellent free app: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.zip

I used it to stitch together a pano of a scenic town nearby. I took 6
photos holding the camera vertically and stitched them together into a
landscape photo 30 x 12. I had it printed at a large format print shop and
framed.

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I seen on TV about taking a panoramic photo with Vista. I want to take 3
pictures of my back yard and make one panoramic photo. How do I do this?
Click to expand...

1) take picture with about 30$ overlap
2) read photos into computer
3) feed them into 'pandora' plugin for GIMP
4) enjoy
 
I seen on TV about taking a panoramic photo with Vista. I want to take 3
pictures of my back yard and make one panoramic photo. How do I do this?
Click to expand...

And use a tripod with a level panhead to take the pictures. That will help
a lot.

And I'm going to look at some of the links the other posters provided -
thanks, guys.
 
And use a tripod with a level panhead to take the pictures. That will
help a lot.

And I'm going to look at some of the links the other posters provided -
thanks, guys.
Click to expand...

The tripod may help steady the shots, but it's not that big a help for
indexing unless it provides the ability to place the lens nodal point
over the axis of rotation.
 
The tripod may help steady the shots, but it's not that big a help for
indexing unless it provides the ability to place the lens nodal point
over the axis of rotation.
Click to expand...

I've tried to take panoramas without a tripod. It's very hard, even with
assistance from the (digital) camera, to get reasonable alignment and
overlap.

The inch or so from the rotational axis to the nodal point is completely
trivial, compared to the ability to keep the various pictures aligned with
each other - unless you're taking a panorama of a diorama that's only a
couple of feet from the camera or using a long telephoto lens (which on the
face of it is a very bad idea in this context).

I also do *not* believe that a photographer using a hand-held camera can
manage to do a better job (than the person with a tripod) of rotating the
camera around a vertical axis exactly on the lens's nodal point. Remember
that the photographer is required to keep the camera nearly level, while at
the same time not moving the camera's nodal point between shots as much as
the tripod user might.

Feel free to educate me :-)
 
I've tried to take panoramas without a tripod. It's very hard, even with
assistance from the (digital) camera, to get reasonable alignment and
overlap.

The inch or so from the rotational axis to the nodal point is completely
trivial, compared to the ability to keep the various pictures aligned
with each other - unless you're taking a panorama of a diorama that's
only a couple of feet from the camera or using a long telephoto lens
(which on the face of it is a very bad idea in this context).

I also do *not* believe that a photographer using a hand-held camera can
manage to do a better job (than the person with a tripod) of rotating
the camera around a vertical axis exactly on the lens's nodal point.
Remember that the photographer is required to keep the camera nearly
level, while at the same time not moving the camera's nodal point
between shots as much as the tripod user might.

Feel free to educate me :-)
Click to expand...

Very well. The point is that unless you have the nodal point over the
axis of rotation, you are introducing distortion. How much of a problem
that is in reality will depend to a large extend on what you're
photographing - i.e. how far away. For long distance scenic panoramas, it
generally isn't a problem either way (tripod or handheld) - I've done it
both ways with similar results. In the instanace mentioned, i.e. the
backyard, it would probably be somewhat better on a tripod since the
natural inclination for handheld users is to rotate around the body axis
- which is further removed from the nodal point than the default tripod
setup. At that close range, I would expect to see some distortions anyway
- unless nodal point is taken into account.
 
Very well. The point is that unless you have the nodal point over the
axis of rotation, you are introducing distortion. How much of a problem
that is in reality will depend to a large extend on what you're
photographing - i.e. how far away. For long distance scenic panoramas, it
generally isn't a problem either way (tripod or handheld) - I've done it
both ways with similar results. In the instanace mentioned, i.e. the
backyard, it would probably be somewhat better on a tripod since the
natural inclination for handheld users is to rotate around the body axis
- which is further removed from the nodal point than the default tripod
setup. At that close range, I would expect to see some distortions anyway
- unless nodal point is taken into account.
Click to expand...

We seem to be in at least partial agreement :-)

For me, the ideal would be a tripod with an accurate level and, just for a
degree of consistency, a calibrated panoramic head - but I'm not likely to
take many panoramic shots anyway, so you might justifiably ask why I am
arguing.

It's been along time since I tried a panoramic shot. It was from a
lighthouse. I had to walk around the light assembly to point in the
different directions, so a pan-head wouldn't have worked directly anyway,
although a level tripod and a compass would have been useful. As it
happens, the results weren't great.

To be clear - I totally agree with you that in principle the rotation
should be around the optical center. It's just that in practice (i.e., in
distant scenes beyond a few feet) the effect is not observable, and in any
case, just going from hand-held to a tripod would normally help a lot.

Actually, given my legs, a tripod would help me even if I just steadied
myself against it for a hand-held shot :-)
 
I was using a great old program from Ulead called Cool 360. It did panoramic
and full 360 pics from a series of shots you took. However, Cool 360 does
NOT work with Vista. I've tried a few other panorama programs, but none are
as easy as Cool 360.
Anyway, no one answered the question...how do you do pans in Vista (never
mind the technical aspects of taking the shot)? Assume the shots have been
taken and are ready to be stitched.
 
I was using a great old program from Ulead called Cool 360. It did
panoramic and full 360 pics from a series of shots you took. However,
Cool 360 does NOT work with Vista. I've tried a few other panorama
programs, but none are as easy as Cool 360.
Anyway, no one answered the question...how do you do pans in Vista
(never mind the technical aspects of taking the shot)? Assume the shots
have been taken and are ready to be stitched.
Click to expand...

Simply feed them into the pandora plugin in GIMP. It only does one layer,
left to right - that should be perfectly adequate for this exercise. It
is fast, simple and does a nice job.
 
I think he means Windows Live Photo Gallery. You can do alot of things with
photos, including the Panoramic Stitching he's asking about. It came free
with Vista Home Premium, I don't know about the other versions.

Buddha
 
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