Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Types of Panoramic Images

Thanks to digital technology with panoramic images, you can push the boundaries of panoramic photography to new limits and experiment with creative ideas. As well as conventional landscape- format panos, why not have a go at shooting vertical panos?

¦ VERTICAL The only difference between vertical and horizontal panos is that you shoot a sequence of frames starting at the ground and working up - ideal for tall buildings and monuments - rather than left to right. Avoid using a wide-angle lens for vertical panos.

The distortion and stretching of perspective is almost certain to make the stitch impossible to complete, or at best you'll end up with a very weird shape because elements in the first frame will appear much larger than those in subsequent frames as they're further away from the camera.

¦ SPHERICAL: Spherical panos cover a full 360° along the horizontal axis and 180° along the vertical. They're mainly used for virtual-reality applications and 
intended to be projected on the inside of a sphere to correct the distortion. You can use a fisheye lens to achieve the 180° vertical coverage in one hit, and shoot three or four images along the horizontal axis with it to cover 360°, but you're more likely to have an ultra wide-angle lens in the 14-15mm range (full-frame).

To create a spherical pano with that, all you need to do is shoot two rows of images along the horizontal axis - one with the camera tilted up and the other with it tilted down, overlapping at the horizon. If you use this method, any stitching software should be capable of merging the images, though PTGui, REALVIX Stitcher and PanaVue Image Assembler are recommended.

¦ CYLINDRICAL: These usually also cover 360° on the horizontal access, but don’t cover 180° vertically like a spherical pano. They tend to be used to take you on a 'virtual’ tour of building interiors, market squares and so on with the aid of applications such as Flash Player, QuickTime and Java. You can view and print a cylindrical panorama as a flat object, but horizontal lines appear as curves, giving an 'end of the world’ effect. Panoramic cameras with a rotating lens such as the Noblex or Horizon also create this effect.

¦ CUBIC: The problem with spherical panoramas is that they suffer from distortion to the horizontal and vertical lines. Cubics overcome this by using six images that represent the inside faces of a cube, so each image is distortion-free. To create a cubic image of a room, for example, you could shoot each of the four walls head-on, then look directly up at the ceiling then down at the ground. The images are then arranged in the correct order as a 'cross’ so that software such as QuickTime VR can display them.

¦ PLANETS: Of all the weird and wonderful panorama techniques, this is the easiest but by far the most striking. All you do is take a 360° horizontal panorama, make a few quick changes to it in Photoshop and voila - you end up with a circular image that looks like you levitated above the earth's surface and captured it with a fisheye lens. Turn to page 96 to learn how to create your own planets.

¦ GIGAPIXEL PANORAMAS: One of the benefits of being able to stitch digital files together is that the resolution of the final image is increased. Gigapixel panoramas take this idea to the extreme by combining dozens of images - hundreds in some cases. A long telephoto lens is used to capture small sections of a scene, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. For the best results, a robotic panoramic head such as the Gigapan Epic Pro(£810) is used so that the images are precisely spaced in columns and rows. Software such as PTGui can stitch gigapixel images, but make sure your computer has plenty of RAM!





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