Panoramics
29th December 2021
Panoramic images are great for showing wide vistas. Should you stitch or crop? And what about older images?
A recent upload got me thinking. Going through my archive I found some shots of the work at London Waterloo, the first terminal for high speed trains from Europe. That was 30 years ago. Before the Maastricht Treaty, the Euro and the Schengen agreement. But that's not the point, I'm just putting you in the picture, taking you back in time when it was film all the way and that is a point to note.
There were viewing windows for the public and commuters to see the work in progress. I wanted to cover it all, so took two shots, job done (the photography that is, not the construction). So I uploaded both images for those interested. Shortly afterwards, after looking at comments, it became apparent that the right side of the one image overlapped with the left of the other, by about 15% of the image. For stitching panoramas the suggested overlap is double that. Would they blend OK? Well it took literally a couple of seconds in Affinity Photo to find out, and you can see for yourself.
I mentioned that film was the important point. It's easy these days to take a number of images and combine them into a panoramic either in software or directly in camera. At the time, in 1991, such a facility was bordering on science fiction for normal photography. The concept was there, as NASA for example had been stitching together multiple images from space probes and satellites for many years,
There were panoramic displays created, of course. Take several shots, make prints, and then mount them on a board after carefully matching them up and using a sharp scalpel to cut away unwanted overlapping parts. If all prints were identically exposed and colour balanced then that'd be fine, but even small differences become very noticeable, and with machine prints that was always the case.
Fortunately I took my images on transparency film but I still needed to be careful with the scans. Well actually I wasn't that fastidious but it still seemed to work. But just consider, I only took two images to show the scene with no conception that I'd ever want or be able to join them together. I may have more serendipitous images in my archive waiting to be discovered.
Stitching is the way to go, rather than cropping because you end up with high quality high resolution images. Cropping means you lose so much in terms of image real estate. Depending on how panoramic you want to so that could be more than half the complete frame. I don't think I had, at the time, a lens wide enough to capture the whole scene so a crop was out of the question. And the Hasselblad Xpan hadn't been invented. Talking of cropping, there was a panoramic disposable camera available around that time, with a wideangle lens (well not too wide, about 24 mm on full frame 35 mm but certainly sufficient for many purposes) which utilised the central part of the frame. As many people's use of a wideangle could include unnecessary sky and foreground such a crop was useful I guess. I may dig out those images sometime.
There is some very specialist (and expensive) gear out there for creating shots for stitching together. The idea is that you rotate the camera and lens combination around the lens's nodal point. That's good theory but I've never used them and all my panoramas look fine. Ably demonstrated by my 30 year old example. Would I consider buying such gear? No. Software is sufficiently accomplished.
There are some things that do help a lot though. Ensuring identical exposure on all images and no shifting of focus mean the resulting image doesn't have any 'odd bits' that the software may struggle with. So if you haven't done panoramics before, there's nothing to be afraid of.
This is my last blog this year so I'll wish all readers a Happy New Year for 2022.
All text and images © Keith Rowley 2021
A recent upload got me thinking. Going through my archive I found some shots of the work at London Waterloo, the first terminal for high speed trains from Europe. That was 30 years ago. Before the Maastricht Treaty, the Euro and the Schengen agreement. But that's not the point, I'm just putting you in the picture, taking you back in time when it was film all the way and that is a point to note.
There were viewing windows for the public and commuters to see the work in progress. I wanted to cover it all, so took two shots, job done (the photography that is, not the construction). So I uploaded both images for those interested. Shortly afterwards, after looking at comments, it became apparent that the right side of the one image overlapped with the left of the other, by about 15% of the image. For stitching panoramas the suggested overlap is double that. Would they blend OK? Well it took literally a couple of seconds in Affinity Photo to find out, and you can see for yourself.
I mentioned that film was the important point. It's easy these days to take a number of images and combine them into a panoramic either in software or directly in camera. At the time, in 1991, such a facility was bordering on science fiction for normal photography. The concept was there, as NASA for example had been stitching together multiple images from space probes and satellites for many years,
There were panoramic displays created, of course. Take several shots, make prints, and then mount them on a board after carefully matching them up and using a sharp scalpel to cut away unwanted overlapping parts. If all prints were identically exposed and colour balanced then that'd be fine, but even small differences become very noticeable, and with machine prints that was always the case.
Fortunately I took my images on transparency film but I still needed to be careful with the scans. Well actually I wasn't that fastidious but it still seemed to work. But just consider, I only took two images to show the scene with no conception that I'd ever want or be able to join them together. I may have more serendipitous images in my archive waiting to be discovered.
Stitching is the way to go, rather than cropping because you end up with high quality high resolution images. Cropping means you lose so much in terms of image real estate. Depending on how panoramic you want to so that could be more than half the complete frame. I don't think I had, at the time, a lens wide enough to capture the whole scene so a crop was out of the question. And the Hasselblad Xpan hadn't been invented. Talking of cropping, there was a panoramic disposable camera available around that time, with a wideangle lens (well not too wide, about 24 mm on full frame 35 mm but certainly sufficient for many purposes) which utilised the central part of the frame. As many people's use of a wideangle could include unnecessary sky and foreground such a crop was useful I guess. I may dig out those images sometime.
There is some very specialist (and expensive) gear out there for creating shots for stitching together. The idea is that you rotate the camera and lens combination around the lens's nodal point. That's good theory but I've never used them and all my panoramas look fine. Ably demonstrated by my 30 year old example. Would I consider buying such gear? No. Software is sufficiently accomplished.
There are some things that do help a lot though. Ensuring identical exposure on all images and no shifting of focus mean the resulting image doesn't have any 'odd bits' that the software may struggle with. So if you haven't done panoramics before, there's nothing to be afraid of.
This is my last blog this year so I'll wish all readers a Happy New Year for 2022.
All text and images © Keith Rowley 2021