Panorama Photographs, S Prairie Creek
And a discussion of technical versus emotional accuracy of photographs
There are two ways to make panoramas with medium format cameras:
Sliding back panos
Rotating camera panos
The fist one may be new to you; it uses the ability of some cameras to slide the sensor/film sideways. You need a lens that casts a wide image (called image circle) to do this, however.
If you have a lens with an image circle bigger than the film or sensor, and moveable film/sensor, you can take an image at one extreme, and another image at the other extreme, and get a reasonable but not terribly large panorama.
The lower image on this page is an example of a sliding back panorama.
To take a rotating camera pano, you…rotate the camera on a tripod between shots.
The image above is an example of a three-shot panorama.
Typically, you want considerable overlap between the shots, to make it easier for the software to stitch the images together correctly.
That bit about stitching the images together takes us back to the topic of lens distortions. If there are distortions in the images, the stitching software may have some trouble putting things together. I had that kind of trouble with the panorama at the top of the page. The distortions were not bad, but the software had trouble anyway. I suspect that the issue was the complexity of the leaves in the image; it made matching things up difficult.
I overcame this problem by stitching two images together, then adding third in a new stitch operation. It was still a bit on the messy side, but it worked well enough that I could clean it up manually.
Here’s a more ambitious panorama of that area. This one uses five images, and is also a rotating camera pano. Affinity Photo was able to stitch all five together in one step, but, again, I had to do a fair amount of manual cleanup.
The image looks a bit odd because it is a rotating camera panorama. I rotated the camera to cover more than 180º, so the river at the bottom looks more like a lake.
If you want, you can even do a 360º panorama, although to connect the ends you would need special software both to make it and to view it.
Both of these panos are quite large, and you should click on them to see them on a new page, and then click again to enlarge that to full size. These are not ‘full size’ in the sense of 100% of the image; the top pano is 20% of full size and the bottom one is 18% of full size, so that the file size isn’t too much to deal with.
A sliding back pano looks pretty natural, and needs a lens with a wide enough illuminated circle to make one. A rotating pano can be quite long, and many types of cameras can make one. Some, like the iPhone camera, will even do the stitching for you automatically.
You may have noticed that the colors in the two photos are very different. The top photo was adjusted to emphasize other colors than green that are present in the photo. The bottom one is more straight out of camera, with lots and lots of green everywhere. My main reason to adjust the top photo was to show the interesting brown color of the water (from tannins, that come from some of the evergreen trees on the mountains). The lower photo gives a better impression of the sea of green you see in the Pacific Northwest forests.
It is interesting to me that when I just walk through the forest, it looks and feels very green like the power photo. But when I stop and look more closely, I start to see the yellows and browns and red that are evident in the top photo. I include both to show another aspect of photography: it is not just about making a record. Our feelings and perceptions are linked, and what we see is not necessarily what is there. A photo can be used to suggest both technically and emotionally accurate information.