Panorama problem - paralax

[ntx]

@gamgee:
Here's some of my work (some well made, some not). I don't embed the photos in the post cause they aren't made with a Pentax (BTW the workflow is the same)
This panorama comes from the wood in Bagno di Romagna (Forli' - Italy); shot handheld shows the blending of many leafs.
This one is from my town; shot handheld; as you can see I have included the two girls in a full slice of the panorama (this one is made of 13 shots)... look at the shadow on the street: the shadow fades away. This happened cause clouds cross the sun: the solution I have applied is to softly blend the shots so I can joke the observer eyes.
Sport panoramas. This one is from a football match in the local field; shot from a hole in the fence (note the faded shape on the left) "quite-handheld". Here what you must do is shoting the slice when the players play in the same direction (don't care if you shot different playing action)... the post-processing is just to avoid cutted players (easy!).
This one is about a cycling race in the town... handheld... well, this is a fake! Why? I explain: I first shooted the whole panorama of the streets with the people, after that I shot the cyclists in a separate photo. In post-production I stitched again the whole panorama with the other shot.... much work, expecially to fix shadows (got a misalignment).
Water. This beautiful seaside is from San Foca (Lecce - Italy); shot handheld with a circular polarizer. The waves are perfectly blend... even the one on the left that looks so straight (the blending mask wasn't there).
Night panoramas. Rome by night; shot using one of that ugly gorilla-tripods. The hard thing here is sharing good stitching points to have correct blend... the darkness let few detail available for stitching points.
Enhancing DOF. This flower is 3 cm wide; shot handheld (not joking) with a +4 closeup lens. The photo is composed by two shots: one for placing the focus in the middle of the flower, the other with the focus on the border. Not much post-production work (just fading a bit more the blending masks).
Strange things. This building is squared in reality but I wanted to take a shot that shows 3 sides of it. Here I made a mistake: too less shots. The key in this kind of panorama is to walk around the subject always at the same distance from its center. They need much post production work. I included this shot cause many people liked it (or at least they said so...).

Hope you like my panoramas or, at least, I hope they could give you some idea.

About small rooms: they are a havoc! You need dozens shots to get a nice (not good, just nice) result. I tried make a panorama of my bath (panorama? :P ) and 23 shots wasn't enough to cover a 110x110 degrees field of view. Also wide angle lens increase the problems (but if you don't use a wide angle you'll need 50+ shots for 90x90 degrees).

Bye
Jenner

[panoguy]

Originally Posted by gamgee

Panoguy, thanks a lot for your generous offer!
Where can I see some of your work?

I'm ever-so-slowly updating my website with a new gallery. (It's like a car that lives in a garage on a pile of parts and oil!) You can see some of my older work here as a mix of Flash 9 and Quicktime VRs:

Fullscreen QTVRs of the Don Valley Brickworks

and here: Fullscreen QTVRs from Annot, France

(edit) Oh yeah, I also use a very precise panohead: Nodal Ninja NN5. As you've discovered, this pretty much takes care of parallax problems...

Also, I work for the (gigantic) software company that makes Stitcher, so I know that product very well. (But it's not a real-time 3D renderer, so I don't work on it directly, but I know the guys in France that make it, and they're brilliant if a bit distracted... ) If I can't stitch something they'd love to have at it!

[gamgee]

Great, I like your panos, thanks for sharing people!

Panoguy, did you really do a 360 degrees HDR pano ("Inside the rocks")? How many frames? I like reflexive sphere in the middle!

[panoguy]

You might not believe this, but the "inside the rocks" and the others from France were created from only 3 frames. I used an 8mm circular fisheye on an APS-C sensor camera (back then a Canon 300D or 20D) which produces a "barrel" image, and not a full 180 circle. 3 of these can be "tilted" and stitched together to get a nearly complete sphere of decent quality (better than just 2 circular fisheyes back-to-back from a full-frame camera, in fact).

Many of the panoramas were also shot as HDR, where minimizing the number of shots "around" is important because a large number of exposure brackets is needed for each "direction." Here is my very old and very brief explanation of what I used and how I did it:
Cheap, high-res, HDR panoramas!

Page 2 shows the "tilted barrel" fisheye images that I would use. Dr. Luca Vascon pioneered this capture method and helped design the panohead that I used back then. I currently use a Nodal Ninja 5 and a K20D w/ a DA 10-17mm at 10mm, which requires 6 "around" and 1 "up" to get the same coverage. The trade-off in time is helped by the 5 shot AEB on the K20D, and the resolution doubles (plus the DA 10-17mm is much sharper than the Sigma 8mm).

There is a whole sub-culture of photographers and engineers that explore these things, and I've always learned from them. If you want to have your head blown open about spherical panoramic photography, visit the Panotools NG forum here: PanoToolsNG : PanoTools NG So many helpful geniuses (and a few trolls, sigh), and a few of them even use Pentax cameras!