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How many photos to make 360?
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I assume if you know the angle of view of your lens, you can determine how many photos it takes to make a 360 degree panorama. I have a zoom lens (12-60mm) that ranges from 84 to 20 degree angle of view. So the widest angle would take take 5 shots to cover 360 degrees. Is that correct?
And there would be 12 degrees of overlap. Is that enough overlap?
This is a four-thirds sensor (Olympus), so if you shoot portrait rather than landscape mode, it would be as if you had 63 degree angle of view? Would 3 degree overlap be enough, shooting 6 shots, or would you need 7 shots?
Posted at 12:26PM, 20 August 2008 PDT
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i shoot 10mm (1.6x camera body) in portrait orientation, and it takes 10 shots to cover 360 degrees. that leaves me with about 50% overlap. more overlap means better dealing with parallax mismatches, lens distortion and aberration uncorrected by the stitching software, and moving objects.
12mm on a Four-Thirds camera is equivalent to 24mm on full frame? that's not as wide, and you probably need more shots unless you shoot in landscape orientation.
this is a 360x180, which requires 21 shots for me:
Posted 46 months ago.
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The amount of overlap you 'need' depends on the quality you want.
Wide lenses generally are only really sharp in the centre, so if you're after the best possible finished composite you should only use narrow vertical strips of each individual image. To get enough of these narrow strips you need to shoot a lot of photographs, thus a lot of overlap (50% or more). If, on the other hand, quality is of less importance than speed (while shooting), or amount of processing work and time, then you'll want as little overlap as possible. The best way to find out what works best for you is to do some tests yourself.
Posted 46 months ago.
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In the comment you say you used 23 shots. Awesome panorama by the way.
Originally posted 46 months ago.
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VictorMk1 (read my profile) edited this topic 46 months ago.
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First of all, I will be using a Nodal NInja 5 panoramic tripod head and expect to be meticulous about the setup, so as I understand this will reduce issues related to parallax. I would like to be sure I understand the math. It seems to me that it is more helpful to talk about a lens's angle of view instead of the size in millimeters, so we are comparing apples to apples. If I had no overlap and a lens with a 60 degree angle of view, would 6 photos cover the full 360 degrees exactly, or am I overlooking something?
Do most people shoot their panoramas landscape or portrait?
Posted 46 months ago.
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thanks! it's 23 shots because the nadir shot was a composite of 3 shots. in principle 20 shots should be enough if i could somehow make the tripod and pano bracket disappear. :-)
even if you use a pano head, some small amount of parallax mismatch is still unavoidable. if you use a fisheye lens, it's even more problematic, as fisheye lenses don't have a constant no-parallax point. the math is almost right, "almost" in the sense that the rectangular image may or may not be rectangular in the stitched image, depending on the projection. for example, equirectangular will make the edge curved, resulting in empty areas if you shoot without overlap.
i don't think landscape or portrait makes much difference, other than some second-order effects, as long as you have the area covered.
Posted 46 months ago.
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Thanks, wmliu. I see what you're saying.
I guess the best way to get the answer after I have digested all the theory is to get the NN5 head and take some pictures.
I hope this doesn't make me want to go off and buy a full-frame Nikon.
Posted 46 months ago.
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Also keep in mind that if you shoot pano with wide angle lenses there is more of a chance or barrell distortion. I try to stay around 50mm. It takes more photos to make the panorama but they come out looking more natural in my opinion
Posted 46 months ago.
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some stitching software can estimate and correct barrel distortion, e.g., PTGui, which is what i use. in fact, it can even deal with lens shift (lens and image sensor not exactly aligned) which can be a problem with certain wide angle lenses. for example, my Canon 10-22mm requires shift correction, while my 17-40mm f/4L does not.
Posted 46 months ago.
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Lamarvenoy, that is useful information, but my 50mm lens doesn't have the same viewing angle as yours.
Some people have said it would be better to talk about angle of view instead of focal length of lenses or crop factors. Recently, I've come to agree with them.
I am guessing that a 50mm lens on your D80 would be a 32 degree angle of view, which would be about 37.5 mm lens on my Olympus E3. My lens will let me try any angle of view between 20 and 84, so I can do a little trial and error to see how wide I can go without encountering problems.
I will be using PTGui.
Posted 46 months ago.
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took this using an E1 olmpus, autostich (free version) didnt quite make the full circle...... hand held
Posted 46 months ago.
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38 handheld? You're very brave. Do you know what angle of view or at least focal length you used for this?
And don't worry about what those hit miss or maybe people said. This is a hit.
Posted 46 months ago.
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These sites might help :-
www.worldserver.com/turk/quicktimevr/calculators.html#Num...
www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/calc.htm
Posted 46 months ago.
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just looked back at the exif data for the individual shots......... was using an olymus e1 with 14-54mm lens set at 37mm, f16, 1/100sec at iso 100, shot in portrait format ;o}
Originally posted 46 months ago.
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ikkio_too edited this topic 46 months ago.
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Aloysious, these calculators are great. Thanks.
Posted 46 months ago.
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panoramas /
Discuss
thanks! it's 23 shots because the nadir shot was a composite of 3 shots. in principle 20 shots should be enough if i could somehow make the tripod and pano bracket disappear. :-)
even if you use a pano head, some small amount of parallax mismatch is still unavoidable. if you use a fisheye lens, it's even more problematic, as fisheye lenses don't have a constant no-parallax point. the math is almost right, "almost" in the sense that the rectangular image may or may not be rectangular in the stitched image, depending on the projection. for example, equirectangular will make the edge curved, resulting in empty areas if you shoot without overlap.
some stitching software can estimate and correct barrel distortion, e.g., PTGui, which is what i use. in fact, it can even deal with lens shift (lens and image sensor not exactly aligned) which can be a problem with certain wide angle lenses. for example, my Canon 10-22mm requires shift correction, while my 17-40mm f/4L does not.
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