wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Re: How much difference does a pano head make for indoor (room) or outdoor panos?
Keith Martin 2008-Sep-07 13:05:00
Sometime around 7/9/08 (at 18:15 +0800) chris said:
>I recently attended a HDRI presentation at SIGGRAPH and the importance of
>an accurate center of rotation seemed to be pretty highly emphasized.
Rightly so, although it helps to understand the reasons.
The level of difficulties you'll face when stitching shots depends on
how far off the no-parallax-point your rotation center was, how close
parts of the subject were, and whether there was a lot of near/far
difference for things in the shot as well. With those problems,
you'll have overlapping shots with items that occupy different
relative positions. Fixing that kind of problem generally requires
full-on Photoshop fakery and can be impossible to do satisfactorily.
The reason people spend sometimes pretty large sums of money on such
specialist items is because it really does make a significant
material difference both to the level of effort required during
stitching and possible fine-tuning and to the quality and
'believability' of the final product.
If you wanted to shoot cylindrical panoramas you could get pretty
good results by using a basic bar, perhaps from a flash bracket, that
lets you slide the camera back from the tripod's rotation center so
the appropriate point of the lens is there instead. But shooting in
vertical orientation gives better (taller) results, so things start
to get more complex with L bracket contraptions. And shooting
spherical panos complicates matters even further.
If you're not unusually gifted in both the patience and the
mechanical construction departments you'll soon get to the point
where a pano head look like a rather worthwhile investment. :-)
k