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How was this shot made?
Baldy
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This is on ptgui's website, so it must be a stitch. Was it made with like three shots with a fisheye stiched? One straight ahead, one pointed up, and one backwards?
http://www.ptgui.com/gallery/san_francisco_usa_panorama.html
We have a really big wall (120" square) and a place for a shot like this if we can get it high res enough... I wonder if it could be done with like a 24mm lens and more shots?
http://www.ptgui.com/gallery/san_francisco_usa_panorama.html
We have a really big wall (120" square) and a place for a shot like this if we can get it high res enough... I wonder if it could be done with like a 24mm lens and more shots?
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Here is Frank's website:
http://www.frank-nocke.com/
... and e-mail:
franknocke@gmail.com
Maybe send him an inquiry?
To more directly answer your question there are several different methods that could be employed to produce a similar spherical projection onto a square image, if that is your intent.
You could use a rectilinear corrected lens and acquire many images in a spherical pattern and then use panoramic stitching software to create the spherical projection. I suspect that would give you the best possible resolution, dependent upon the number of starting images and their total combined resolution, but that makes the dynamics of a living city street a problem.
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http://www.ptgui.com/gallery/san_francisco_usa_panorama.html
But in case not, here's an image, linked to Frank Nocke's site.
I really want to take a shot like that for a 120"x120" print, but need lots of pixels.
I think he pointed the camera horizontally with a fisheye lens. Then he tilted it up about 30 degrees. Click. Then another 30 and another until the camera was vertical. Then he kept going until it was upside down pointing backwards, 180 degrees from the start. And stitched them together.
So then the question is, how to you make it several rows wide so you have enough resolution to print a 120" print? Do you move the camera down the street 50 feet between each sequence?
If you rotate the camera to the left 30 degrees, then when the camera is pointing straight up, the arcs cross and you get a point of low resolution, no?
I think if you create a spherical panorama, the pano tools will keep all parts of the frame relatively the same size and you will get what you want. At least that's where I'd start...
Wouldn't you also need to consider a different focal length lens--but then what happens to the effect of the fish?
No, the only thing that would affect how many degrees across the sky is or your perspective of the base of the buildings is actually moving the camera. No lens will change your perspective (even tilt shift lenses are only cheating the perspective, same as using the perspective tool in photoshop)
I shoot a lot of fully spherical HDR images for use in film vfx, Normally we use an 8mm, with the camera level, shoot 4 bracketed sets (north east south west) tilt the camera up 45 degrees, shoot 4 again, then tilt down 45degrees, shoot 4 more then move the tripod aside and try and capture one set looking straight down where the tripod was.
That said I have shot full 360's with a 50mm lens and the ONLY difference is a massive increase in resolution and processing time!
See my images below, It's the same projection as the image above, but instead of mapping the ground to the centre and the sky to the outside, it's the other way around.
I really want to shoot this myself and I tell you why: people love Easter eggs in the photo. They love to look for SmugMug's version of Waldo in the shots we have at work. And I'd love to stage it so friends and eye candy are in the photo, like exotic cars and motorcycles instead of random boredom.
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I say get the boys. Jedi, Riley and the crew.
Years ago I made shots like that from extremely wide angle views (could also do it from a stitch) run manually through Helmut Dersch's PTTools .8bf plugins (before PTGui came out). One could either make the island effect seen above in jogle's post, or reverse the polar points to create about what Baldy posted at the top. Now if I could only find that tutorial... Hmmmm.
EDIT
Observation: The image looks like an equiretangular projection (twice as wide as it is high) made from several stitched images shot on a spherical tripod head. It has been through a PTTools remapping filter, or been created from the filter. philohome.com has some ancient tutorials on this, but there's a better site which has the world island effect tutorial, and its reverse, that I'm still trying to locate. There is also an old Photoshop tutorial (using no plugins at all) to make the same type of image. I van picture the tute's in my head but darned if I can find them yet.
EDIT#2
ahaaa - here's one
http://www.panoguide.com/howto/panoramas/circular.jsp
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky
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The resolution is definetly high enough for a print,
in fact I already did, see http://www.nocke.de/Shop/Kunden.php
somewhere above 8000x8000px.
It is a multi-row stitch in PTGUI, yes. 3 rows, I recall. And done around 3 years ago, when automatic markers where still a lot worse than today... I had to export it as Photoshop layers and do a hell
of manual tweaking, 2 evenings, full-time. In particular in the highest row close to the pole of the projection sphere (in the middle of the picture). Not sure which projection I took, but I could look it up in the project. It might be a plain vanilla spherical.
Fascinating! I told him I'd buy a copy.
Cool. I hope you invited him to DGrin and I hope he comes.
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This exact one isn't that high, only about 2k across to check what it would look like. It's a stitch of 84 photos (bracketed) shot at 24mm on the 5DMkII so there's plenty of resolution there, in a normal panorama stitch you see cars in the road and the twisty bits of Lombard St.
Your encouragement is enough for me to work through the few alignment issues I'm getting and produce a seriously high res version.
What makes a big image great is when you can see detail that you'd love to see in a smaller version but can't. And when it's interesting technically, has a great story behind it, etc.
This shot is really interesting technically, and every time I see one like it I wish I could zoom in and see cars on Lombard Street, etc.
The reason I say we can't promise we'd use it is we've broken some hearts before when we saw the original file and realized that enough pixels is necessary but insufficient to create a big image. The lens, light, mount, ISO, and stitching have to combine to make it clean and sharp, not an easy feat for a 140" high print. It defeats all but a very few photographers.
But you sound like someone who could make it happen and I'd love it if you do.
I was in Apple's HQ the other day and they had a 5-story tall image hanging from the rafters of a laptop that was sharp as nails, which Steve Jobs demands. I spoke to the photographer (a SmugMug user) about how he did it, and he stitched together a zillion macro shots that were taken with a great lens at its sharpest f-stop with no vibration, etc. Awesome.
Let me see what I can do. I saw the video on youtube of you showing off your big prints to Scoble, very cool.
If you want a very large file check out the following link: http://www.gigapan.org/