Tuesday, April 15, 2014

On Making a Vertical Panorama

IMGP9123Trying to capture the full height of the mighty kauri tree is difficult, it towers above you but it is difficult to step back and get a full view, as the forest closes around you (like any rainforest). So you have the option of looking straight up (as above), and suffer the difficulty of achieving the depth of field range required, or taking a series of photo progressively looking up (as below left).image The trouble with this approach is one of perspective. I usually use autostitch, rather than a plug-in or microsoft’s ICE, and that has a neat little auto straighten tick box on the orientation settings panel, which helps sort of the perspective issue are you rotate your camera upwards it stretches out the upper images and trying ti keep any strong vertical lines (like the tree trucks) vertical Giving the.stitched image a vase like appearance. If the black borders worry you, you can crop down the the image to remove them.  If your stitching software doesn’t have this feature you can always rotate the photos 90 degress and treat them like a normal pamorana (but expect the tree trucks to curve in on you).

kauri-001 kauri forest pano

The Kauri tree on the right is over 1,000 years old by the way.

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