Originally posted by yucatanPentax - Visit (the same and more) sites and take more interesting photos than in the past.
- Visit sites, taking better technical (sharp) and artistic photos than the past.
- Create visual impressions of the larger site area and tie in individual structures and structure details to the overall scene <-- point at which I began this thread.
- Add panoramas.
- Add GPS and mapping. And the "walk-through" concept is really intriguing.
Evening - I just wanted to add a bit here. On your list here, I do think that you can do everything with what you currently have. I would go out and shoot some stitched panos just to see if it works for you. If it does not appeal to you - don't bother with them. On the "walk-through", the program does feature matching backed to a degree with location, but does not require any location information to work. So, you really do not need any GPS. I am thinking a bit into the future here where I do think that location will become more important. But as folks have commented, there are other way to add location information in - if you desire to do so.
I also wanted to toss some comments in on the topic of stitching panos. To be perfectly accurate, rotating perfectly around the nodal point is the best. Now, in actual practice - unless you have something close in, in front of you - parallax is not really going to be a problem. I have really only shot a couple of panos where it has been a problem, and I should have recognized it and move a bit so that it would not have occurred. Either that, or pulled out my pano head (that I did not bring a couple of times) and used it. Large scale structures, I really doubt that you will have any parallax problems - as they are usually isolated to tall thin objects - small trees, branches, light poles, stuff like that. Yup - its a generalization, but it usually works. In my opinion where pano heads really shine is when you are taking multiple rows with lots of frames. Hand holding, you can make a mistake and leave a void or an empty spot. I do a lot of single row panos, directly off my ballhead with out any nodal rail - but they are landscapes or cityscapes.
Originally posted by yucatanPentax That's what I would expect. A moving sensor compensating for star movement should blur stationary items, right?
But look at these photos.
I readily admit I know nothing about this. Maybe someone who has been astrotracking can explain more to us? O-GPS 1 help here?
I can fill in some detail off the link that you have. I was using that thread as kind of a notebook of what I did and what worked and didn't. It was my first time out with the GPS unit and really shooting the Milky Way. So it was a learning experience on everything. The thread turned in to much more that what I ever imagined. The first page or so of images are of Superstition Mountain. I was using a 12-24 @ 12 or so mm there and found that I could shoot up to about 40 seconds without a lot of noticeable blurring of the landscape. I am now really torn about using the GPS unit to shoot stars with landscape items in them. The other approach is layering in two images - one of the landscape without GPS and then of the star sky with GPS. I have not mastered that as of yet. The Milky Way starts to get good again here in the Northern Hemisphere in February through October. I intend to go out and do some more of this. I have some additional ideas that I want to try. Ultimately, fast glass is the answer to this, and the only really glass available is the Sigma 18-35/f1.8, especially wide at something like 18mm.
The Sigma 18-35/f1.8 would be nice - but, I have just spent my saved camera budget of about 2+ years worth on a K5IIs, a 60-250 with a 1.4TC and have just finished putting together a new PC with a fast CPU, lots of RAM, SSD, and 3TB of mirrored storage - to process on. Right now I am waiting on the 3TB RAID array to do a low level format - and you guys think that a K5 battery takes some time to charge.