Another Panorama

[KingBob]

Hey all, just made another panorama, this time of my home track, the West Coast Model Rally Club, in Perth, Western Australia.

http://www.rcracephotos.com/special/westcoast.html

You'll need quicktime.

[KingBob]

And a second one from the top of the rostrum

http://www.rcracephotos.com/special/westcoast2.html

This one still needs a little cleaning up though.

[jimmy]

Those are seriously ace mate, really like them! I need to have a go at doing one, as it gives a real sense of being there.

what software do you use to make it again?

[BenG]

wow, Got a linky to the software to do that with?

[KingBob]

Theres several different applications you can use, so i'll just explain the way that works for me. Theres no single program to do it, but a combination.

First:
Take the photos!
Not as simple as it sounds. You need the same exposure for every pic, I shoot manually and in RAW, so i can correct the pic after taking it. Also how you take the pics will depend on what lens you're using. My first pano from a different thread was done with a Canon EOS 20D and a Canon 10-22mm EF-S lens at 10mm (16mm fullframe equivalent). This required 28 seperate photos to get the full 360 around with 30-40% overlap in images.
The ones in this thread i did with a Canon 20D and a Sigma 8mm Fisheye, means I can do it in 6 or 8 shots.
You also need to pivot the camera properly, you need to pivot exactly around the nodal point of the lens, to get rid of parralax errors in the images. (parralax is changes in perspective). The nodal point is the point in the lens where the light crosses over and inverts, kinda hard to explain.

Second:
Correct the photos. This is just making sure each pic has the same exposure. Generally this is done when taking the pics, but sometimes they come out a bit dark or bright etc, or you want to change the white balance etc. Any change made to 1 pic, must be made to all others as well! Generally I use photoshop CS2 for all this, using the RAW images as a base.

Three:
Stitch the photos. For this i use an app called PTgui. It's not free, but there is a free demo here: http://www.ptgui.com/download.html
This is time consuming, and is really a try it and see type thing. Basically you import the images, and then set control points to link photos, so the software knows which pics to stitch where. It does take some playing to get a final image. From this, you get a normal rectangular image, which looks way out, but works properly if mapped to the inside of a sphere.

Four:
Turn the image into a quicktime image. For this I use an app called Pano2QTVR which is free for non-commercial use from here: http://www.pano2qtvr.com/

And voila, a panorama.

The first one i did took me about 10 hours, the 2 above took 3 hours combined.

[KingBob]

We had a race on sunday at the same track (my home track) so I made a daytime panorama so you can see things better.

http://www.rcracephotos.com/special/westcoast3.html

[losixxx]

track looks great!