http://www.mediavr.com/cerberusr.htmThis is a (unretouched) spherical pano of a cave but not stitched in
the usual way ie. blended images -- it is assembled in a few seconds
out of 120 (3 degree) very narrow vertical images strips with no
blending at all -- using the mosaic tool of the excellent
Stereophoto Maker.
It is the right shot of a stereo pair. It is the middle exposure of
bracketed sequences. I havent enfused the other exposure panos with
it yet.
It was shot with a very accurate 120 step indexing head I made from a
large gear with a strip of brass clicking into the teeth
The camera here is to the right of the zero parallax point as it
rotates by about 7 cms but still because the steps are so small
perspective jumps are mostly invisible and the light (surprisingly
one might think) seems constant across the joins.
Each strip is a 3 by 180 degree equirectangular strip from a 5D/Nikkor
fisheye -- generated very quickly in PTGui or via a script with the
Panotools plugin.
Why would you want to make panoramas this way --
-- well you can totally automate the stitching process -- it is more
forgiving of slight positioning errors than standard template
stitching (here with stereo panoramas the mispositioning is extreme
compared with standard stitching practice - yet still it stitches ok
automatically)
-- though you must be careful with the constancy of the alignment of
the camera tilt and roll with the rotation axis -- I use a digital
level to check)
.. it is good for stereo panoramas using either the two cameras (or
one camera with shift) or single camera/single rotation methods
.. it is good for scene contrast as you can put a custom lens hood on
the lens to give a narrow strip view of the scene ... and hence is
good for hdr panoramas too.
Peter Murphy
http://www.mediavr.com/blog
