February 10, 2006

Panoramic Pictures and Tripods

Panoramas, shooting pictures in ‘more’ dimensions

One of the things that comes into play with creating a panoramic picture, assembled from more pictures, is first of all, that the pictures should overlap. This gives the software that you use some idea where the pictures should be “stitched”. Even when you use just a graphic editor, like Adobe Photoshop or Paint Shop, this overlap gives you an idea how to glue the pictures together. A general, very general, rule of thumb is about 15 to 25 percent of overlap for each picture. Less means a more difficult stitch, more a more easy stitch.

Important is that the pictures are shot from the same point of view. It is very well possible to shoot very good panoramas by holding your camera yourself and rotating at a precise way, but this requires some experience, and a steady hand. Best, and more easy to stitch, results you get when you use a tripod.

If your panorama picture taking becomes serious, then you will soon realise, that even when you rotate your camera on a tripod and you have enough overlap, the pictures don’t seem to fit together precisly, especially when you have nearby objects in view. This is, because the camera, when it is rotated, not only changes view, but also the location from where the view is “watched”. An easy demonstration, close one eye, and look at your surroundings, carefully examining the horizontal distance between objects near and far. Now turn your head and watch what happens with this horizontal distance between those objects. (Think 2D, and not 3D here!) You will notice that this distance changes in the 2D plane. The same thing happens when you shoot panoramic pictures and don’t take extra measures. Allthough your pictures overlap perfectly, not all objects in the overlap area match up, especially those closeby.

This is called the Parralax Error. Maybe your remember those cameras with a seperate viewfinder, where there was a mechanism, connected to the focus ring to match up the viewfinder view with the actual lens view.

The solution for the Parralax Error is to rotate the camera around the point where this error not occurs. And unfortunately this is not the point where the tripod mount is located… and every camara / lens combination has a different point of “no parralax”. A very very general suggestion is that this point of no parralax is located somewhere between the front of your camera body and the front of your lens. But you have to test to find out where the best point is for your particular camara / lens combination.

Panorama Heads something extra to mount on your tripod to get rid of the parralax error, come in various models and sizes from many manufacturers, and some people create their own.

Here below you find a picture of a Panohead that I made out of a simple rail of a video camera light, but it gave me the possiblity to mount my camara on a tripod at the exact point of no parralax, after some trail and error…..

Pano Head and Tripod

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