Tawayama Safaris - Panorama Photography tests

My involvement with extreme panoramic photography really began back in 2000 when I was preparing for an educational expedition into Canada. We wanted to share the experience with our on-line audience, so I aquired a Nikon Coolpix 950 and a panoramic lens from a now-defunct company called Cyclovision. Some of the images from that trip are found in the daily journals on the Lab-Rover.com site. I had a neat experience learning the technology, seeing the potential applications for QVTR photography, but somehow was left wanting more in image resolution. It was a neat toy, a novelty item in my gear bag, and I never used it much. I used the camera/lens at several events, and had fun with it, but never really utilized it to it's full potential. I think the lack of resolution and fidelity to the images was what turned me off.

I had rented a Noblex panoramic camera for a weeklong hike into the Cascades and had a great time with it as well. I loved the format of the negative, loved the ability to capture a very wide angle of view, and loved printing the panoramic format. Never rented it again, but have fond memories of that trip, the camera, and look at those images often. One is shown below.

I was hand-holding the camera and forgot to get my fingers out of the way! I had huffed up the snowfield about 50 yards, threw off my pack and got the camera out just as the scouts were exiting the frame. I think I was too tired to remember to get my knuckles out of the frame, but it reminds me of the experience and what was involved physically, as well as a visual reminder of that particular portion of the trip. Developing and printing these negatives had it's own challenges. I was forced to shoot the negs for a fairly normal development. I had a lot of shots where the contrast range demanded a minus-2 and a plus-2 exposure and development in the SAME FRAME! The above image is such a frame. Printing it was very difficult, and even my best prints aren't as good as I'd like them. That's where the digital scan comes in handy. I haven't gotten a good scan of it yet, but am confident I will be able to deal with any contrast issues when I do.

Fast forward about 4 years to today. I have recently had a new interest in panoramic photography. I have been absolutely amazed at the quantum leaps that QVTR has taken. What I wanted to accomplish back in 2000 is possible, and a whole lot more. I will leave the 360 deg. immersive photography to those who have refined it to a point near perfection. I am currently pushing my photography in several directions at the same time and taking advantage of developments in software and imaging hardware that did not exist when I dabbled in it earlier.

My goal is to make ultra-high-resolution panoramic photographs, either in color or in black-and-white. The color work will stand on it's own, the black and white work will ultimately be used to make digital negatives. I wish to make very large format carbon and platinum/palladium prints from digital negatives. I will be making these images using digital cameras, inkjet printers and imagesetters concurrent to the making of original ultra-large-format black and white negatives from a 12x20 inch view camera. The goal is to make digital negatives the same size (12x20) as the in-camera film negatives, and display them together in a unified body of work.

So...with that goal in mind (pre-visualisation and all...), I am practicing shooting techniques, digtial image processing techniques and learning some new software that I did not know existed. I do not have my heart set on one specific way of making these large-format digital images, but the basic image capture tool will be a Nikon D1x camera. I am shooting images in the RAW format and processing with Bibble2002. Once the images are processed into 16-bit 60mb .tiff files I can turn my attention to the actual making of the panoramic image.

I have a beta version of PtGui which I am teaching myself through trial and error. I do not know if this is the best software for me to be using, but it's one that I am impressed with. If you know of other software I should be looking at, please do not hesitate to let me know. I was particularly impressed with it's ability to render and match up the power lines. With some parallax involved when the camera rotates, it did an exceptionally good job of matching them up.

The above image is a composite of 3 seperate frames, shot in sequence near my home in Las Vegas, Nevada. The mountains in the back are the Gass Peak Range, and the hills are part of the Corn Creek Wash drainage system. The National Desert Wildlife Refuge is part of this range.

I am learning some things very quickly. I think that I shot these images with the camera on 3-D matrix metering on Program mode, and the exposures for the sky are slightly different. Manual mode from now on I think. Also, the color balance is shifted slightly, that might be due to the difference in exposure, because the color balance was processed identically for all images. The stitches are evident in the above image and I present it as a tool for critique and discussion.

The original images are shot with the camera in the vertical position, and then stitched together in a horizontal format. What is the top and bottom of the end image, was the sides of the camera capture when the original exposures were made in the field when the camera was oriented vertically. This puts a bit of a fly in the ointment, as the stitching software I am using asks for an angle of view for the lens the images were shot with, and typically camera manufacturers measure angle of view horizontally, not vertically. So, I am banging through some of the challenges I have created for myself somewhat blindly, but enjoying the learning curve nonetheless.

If any viewers to this site have any suggestions, criticism, ideas, or just want to talk about the images and techniques, I eagerly await your comments. I know this has been done before, but finding those who have trod down the same path I am creating for myself is proving tricky.

Thanks for your interest and time.

Above is a 6-shot panorama, shooting vertically. I'd like to be able to generate final large images from .tiff files into an ultra-large .tiff file, but before I do, I need to fine-tune the stitching and color balance issues. This image was generated from .jpgs and saved as a final .jpg. Didn't seem to generate any memory errors, so as a test of alignment and learning the program a little bit more I consider it somewhat of a sucess. Now to match exposures and color balance properly.

An 8-panel (or oringinal capture) shot from the D1x. These are processed from .jpg files using PTGui. Still having some problems with the stitching not blending well, there's a definite shift from frame to frame in color balance and density, and also is an ultra-saturated effect being done to the image without any input from me. This is where the fine-tuning and me learning the program will be important. I think I do not have a vital piece of the software installed (enblend), so once that is installed it should solve my problems.

Went out and shot the cityscape of The Strip in Las Vegas with a spring thunderstorm rolling through the valley. This is a 3-panel shot that was stitched by hand in Photoshop. I had seen some excellent results from others doing hand stitching in Photoshop and thought I would try it. The three seperate panels were shot vertically.

A two-panel shot of a flood retention basin in N. Las Vegas. Two shots done vertically and stitched together in PTGui. I am starting to figure out the software and am very happy with the results. I'm saving the original image as a layered .PSD document and then doing some feathering, color balancing etc., in Photoshop. Next will have to be a full-size 12x20 @300dpi image.